American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World

David P. Forsythe, Patrice C. MacMahon, Andrew Wedeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135447632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this volume, several leading foreign policy and international relations experts consider the long term prospects and implications of US foreign policy as it has been shaped and practiced during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The essays in this collection - based on the research of well-respected scholars such as Ole Holsti, Loch Johnson, John Ruggie, Jack Donnelly, Robert Leiber, Karen Mingst, and Edward Luck - offer a clear assessment: while US resources are substantial, Washington's ability to shape outcomes in the world is challenged by its expansive foreign policy goals, its exceptionalist approach to international relations, serious questions about the limits of its hard power resources as well as fundamental changes in the global system. Illustrating one of the central ironies of the contemporary situation in foreign affairs and international relations: that at the very time of the 'unipolar moment, ' the world has become globalized to such an extent that the unilateralism of the Bush Administration leads as much to resistance as it does to coercion, compliance, and cooperation.

American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations.

1

Doctrinal Unilateralism and Its Limits: America and Global Governance in the New Century

JOHN GERARD RUGGIE

This chapter assesses the shift toward American unilateralism during the first administration of President George W. Bush and what it means for global governance. I am not interested in routine unilateral acts, which are a standard practice of states, especially when taken in self-defense. The particular form of unilateralism that concerns me here is the doctrinal belief that the use of American power abroad is entirely self-legitimating, requiring no recourse to the views or interests of others and permitting no external constraints on its self-ascribed aims. By global governance, in turn, I mean the constellation of treaty-based and customary international law, shared norms, institutions, and practices by which the international community as a whole seeks to manage its common affairs.

Are America and global governance on a collision course? If so, how did that come to be? And what are the consequences—for the United States and for the rest of the world?

This chapter has two aims, the first of which is to place the resurgence of American doctrinal unilateralism into its historical and conceptual contexts, in the hope that doing so will help us to understand it better. The second goal is to argue that, despite the vast power asymmetries that exist between the United States and the rest of the world, especially in the military realm, it is not as easy as it may seem at first blush for the United States to sustain such a unilateralist posture today. One major reason, ironically, is the success of America’s own post-World War II strategy of creating an integrated global order, inhabited by a diversity of state and nonstate actors and based on the animating principles—if not always the practice—of democracy, the rule of law, and multilateralism. Thus, the United States is locked in a struggle today not only with its allies and other states but also with the results of its own creation—and, in that sense, with its own sense of self as a nation.

On Change and Continuity

Diplomatic History, the official journal of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, published a roundtable discussion recently about what is new and what is not in the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, focused in particular on its unilateralism.¹ Melvyn Leffler, a realist by orientation and whose introductory essay is the focal point for the debate, stresses elements of continuity: Samuel Flagg Bemis, Leffler reminds us, described Theodore Roosevelt’s interventions in the Caribbean and Central America as protective imperialism. “… The wise men of the Harry Truman administration worked brilliantly to forge alliances, but they never foreswore the right to act unilaterally … When they perceived threats, especially in the Third World, U.S. officials during the Cold War did not refrain from acting unilaterally”—Leffler notes Vietnam in particular. Even President Bill Clinton is said to have followed course, continuing to build up America’s military might and to preserve “the right to act unilaterally and to strike preemptively.” What did change during the first Bush administration, Leffler concludes, is that the existential threat posed by 9/11 led policymakers to permit the assertion of American ideals and principles, such as liberty and democracy promotion, to trump the “careful calculation of interests [that] is essential to discipline American power and temper its ethnocentrism.” But he finds ample historical precedent for that tendency as well at previous points of major crisis.²

Other contributors to the roundtable criticize Leffler from both sides. One charges him contentiously with not identifying and explaining yet a deeper, and different, source of continuity: “choosing a war nearly every generation seem[s] to be part of core U.S. national identity.”³ Most of the others accuse him of overlooking critical discontinuities. Says one, “If policy has only been recalibrated [by the Bush administration] rather than changed, why are we discussing [it] in these papers and why are so many foreign policy historians and analysts expressing concern?”⁴

As illuminating as this debate may be, ultimately it remains unsatisfactory because the narratives it presents are conceptually thin, and its core analytical elements are underspecified. Thus, I propose to view the issue of American unilateralism through somewhat more refined lenses, thereby constructing some building blocks of an argument that should permit a more systematic assessment of recent trends in U.S. foreign policy—and their sustainability in the years ahead.

American Exceptionalism

As a nation, America was not only born free, Robert Keohane once remarked; it was also “born lucky.”⁵ For much of its history before the turn of the twentieth century, the United States—far removed from the constant jostling of European power politics, heavily self-sufficient, able to grow into continental scale, protected by oceans on either side and adjoined by relatively weak and usually friendly neighbors to the north and south, and a magnet attracting a constant inflow of newcomers eager to make a fresh start—luxuriated in the posture described by John Quincy Adams of being “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all … the champion and vindicator only of her own.”⁶ Thus, America’s traditional aversion to “entangling alliances,” first expressed in George Washington’s farewell address, flowed naturally from its geopolitical constitution.⁷ By 1823, the United States felt sure enough of itself for President James Monroe to enunciate the doctrine that the United States would view as “an unfriendly disposition” any European intervention in the Americas, though until the end of the nineteenth century the British navy, for reasons of its own, undoubtedly played a greater role in safeguarding the Monroe Doctrine than did the United States itself.

By the turn of the century, however, the world was closing in on the United States. On September 5, 1901, President William McKinley delivered a major address on America’s new role in the world at the new century’s first world’s fair in Buffalo, New York. “God and men have linked nations together,” he said. “No nation can longer be indifferent to any other.”⁸ The very next day, at the same place, McKinley was assassinated, making Theodore Roosevelt (or TR as he was known) the nation’s president. TR picked up on McKinley’s theme and carried it a step further a few months later in his first State of the Union message: “The increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations,” he declared, “render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.”⁹The dilemma, however, was how to interest an unconcerned country—the Congress as well as the public—in that mission.

For the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations the issue initially was quite unproblematic: The United States would have to behave like other great powers, for the simple reason that it, like the European great powers, was affected by and in turn helped shape the global balance of power. It alone would decide when and how to act abroad in accordance with its self-defined interests. And so McKinley took the country on a brief imperialist fling following the Spanish–American War of 1898, fought on flawed if not false premises; he also annexed Hawaii and the Philippines while making a protectorate of Cuba. For his part, TR instigated the creation of the state of Panama and built the isthmus canal, and he issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, whereby the United States claimed the right to intervene in the affairs of its southern neighbors. For good measure, TR sent the entire American fleet on a symbolic around-the-world cruise to demonstrate that the United States had arrived as a global player.

But the “fever of imperialism,” as David Fromkin describes it,¹⁰ died down quickly, stymied by Congressional purse strings and declining public interest, though interventions in Central America and the Caribbean continued in response to real and imagined threats to the security of the canal and the sanctity of American investments. In short, while the United States was becoming increasingly powerful, conventional raison d’état as a basis for global engagement held little allure for the American people, who refused to see their nation as a normal great power, doing what great powers supposedly did.

Teddy Roosevelt was frustrated by this lack of interest in global engagement, but in the process he also discovered one promising way to mobilize the country behind that agenda—by tapping into strains of American exceptionalism.¹¹ Searching for the right formula, he invoked, with equal enthusiasm, a mixture of piety, patriotism, and jingoism—so much so that, in John Milton Cooper’s biography of TR and Woodrow Wilson, it is a toss-up who ends up the “priest” and who the “warrior.”¹² Thus, Roosevelt was the first American leader to propose a league of nations as early as 1914, calling it a “World League for the Peace of Righteousness” and saying that it would work like that familiar American institution, “a posse comitatus.”¹³

Wilson, of course, went considerably further, promising to make the world safe for a whole panoply of American values and to enshrine that promise in a new international system—thereby generating the doctrine that still bears his name. When Wilson asked Congress on April 2, 1917, to declare war on imperial Germany, he stated solemnly that if America must shed blood, it would be “for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”¹⁴ But with geography and neutrality no longer able to protect the United States and World War I having demonstrated that the balance-of-power system was doomed to failure, Wilson concluded that to achieve these aims “we must have a society of nations” built on premises the American people could recognize as their own.¹⁵

And so, via the route of American exceptionalism, the world got its first general-purpose multilateral institution, the League of Nations—albeit without U.S. membership. Conventional wisdom has it that Wilson’s plans were stymied by the lure of isolationism. The reality is a good deal more complex. According to Lawrence Gelfand, a highly regarded Wilson scholar, “existing evidence, essentially the considered judgment of seasoned politicians and journalists in the fall of 1918 and well into the spring of 1919, pointed toward solid public support for American membership in the League of Nations.”¹⁶Moreover, there were barely more than a dozen hard-core irreconcilables in the Senate who were opposed to U.S. membership in a league of any form. Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, was prepared to vote for the League and to deliver enough Republican votes to ratify the treaty, provided that Wilson accepted Lodge’s reservations. In essence, they came down to this nonnegotiable issue: in Lodge’s words, to “release us from obligations which might not be kept, and to preserve rights which ought not to be infringed.”¹⁷ But this was not isolationism; it was unilateralism. Wilson’s inability or unwillingness to compromise, coupled with his rapidly declining health that cut short his campaign for the League, doomed the effort.¹⁸

Isolationism was not the cause of treaty’s defeat, then; it was its consequence. But the two were often hard to distinguish. For example, Senator William Borah, one of the few isolationist leaders seriously interested in foreign affairs, sounded very much like Lodge when he insisted that the United States “does propose … to determine for itself when civilization is threatened, when there may be a breach of human rights and human liberty sufficient to warrant action, and it proposes also to determine for itself when to act and in what manner it shall discharge the obligation which time and circumstances impose.”¹⁹ The trouble was that, until the direct attack on Pearl Harbor twenty-seven months into World War II, no international threat was ever deemed to pass that threshold.

As a result, for Franklin Roosevelt (also known as FDR), the key postwar challenge was to overcome the isolationist legacy of the 1930s and to ensure sustained U.S. engagement in achieving and maintaining a stable international order. He, like Wilson and TR before him, recognized that the American people needed an animating vision beyond the mere dictates of balance-of-power politics—the failure of which had dragged America into two world wars in the span of a single generation. Thus, FDR, too, framed his plans for winning the peace in terms he believed would resonate with the public: creating an American-led order based on relatively modest forms of constitutionalism: that is, rules and institutions promoting human betterment through provisions for a collective security organization grafted onto a concert of power; stable money and free trade; human rights and decolonization; and an international civic politics beyond the domain of states through active engagement by the private and voluntary sectors.

FDR’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sustaining American Power in a Globalized World
• 1 Doctrinal Unilateralism and its Limits: America and Global Governance in the New Century
• 2 Article 2(4) on the Nonuse of Force: What were we thinking?
• 3 Sovereign Inequality and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Society
• 4 American Security, the Use of Force, and the Limits of the Bush Doctrine
• 5 The Bush Doctrine and Multilateral Institutions
• 6 American Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Did the September 11 Attacks Change Everything?
• 7 Supervising America’s Secret Foreign Policy: A Shock Theory of Congressional Oversight for Intelligence
• 8 American Policy toward Enemy Detainees in the War on Terrorism
• 9 Democracy Promotion and American Foreign Policy: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Future
• 10 Draining Swamps and Transplanting Values: Nation Building and the American Military
• 11 The United States and Europe: Explaining the Transatlantic Bond
• 12 The Bush Doctrine in Asia
• 13 The Bush Doctrine and Democracy Promotion in the Middle East
• Contributors
• Index