No country can escape its geography and history when it comes to establishing its foreign
policy principles and priorities. The US is not just a country; it is a
continent, protected by two vast oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Of
course, even its geo-graphical advantages cannot protect the US from terrorist
attacks but the enormous size of the US, plus its population and economic base,
give it a unique position in the world. True, there are countries larger in
size (Russia, Canada) and population (China, India) but no other country enjoys
the panoply of resources that befit the term ‘‘superpower’’ or ‘‘hyper power.’’
As can be seen from Table 1.1, the European Union (EU) is already an economic
superpower but it is far from being a political and military superpower like
the US.
Like
all other countries, the US has always acted in defense of its national interests
but a continuous thread of idealism has also found a place in American foreign
policy.
Throughout
its history the US has viewed itself as having a unique mission in the world,
to promote its values of ‘‘freedom, independence, and democracy’’ and its
mar-ket economy or capitalist economic system. Other countries, including all
other per-manent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), France,
the UK, Russia and China, share, or shared in the past, their
own messianic vision. Few have been in a osition to promote their values abroad
to the same extent as the US, espe-cially in the latter half of the twentieth
century. The 1990s were the climax of ‘‘the American century.
’’
Not only had the US won the Cold War but its conomy raced ahead of other industrial
nations and its culture and technology had spread to every
corner
of the globe. Whether studying in China, Russia, Brazil, India or ermany, students
were likely to be using Microsoft, listening to Madonna, watching Tom Cruise,
drinking Coke and eating Big Macs.
At
the start of a new millennium, with a new administration taking over in
Washington, there were many debates on the future direction of American foreign
policy. A host of reports poured out of Congress, think tanks, and various
national commissions seeking to define American external interests and
priorities. A central theme of this debate was whether the US should use its
extraordinary power only to protect vital American interests, about which there
was no consensus, or whether it should play a wider role in the world. In
general, those on the left argued that values (e.g. promotion of democ-racy,
protection of human rights) were vital to American interests while those on the
right were more skeptical of a values approach to foreign policy. Strangely, at
this unique historical moment, there was very little discussion about the
external pending priorities of the US nor about the most appropriate
instruments the US should be using and developing to maintain its global
position. Neither was there any substantive dis-cussion on the kind of image
that the US projected abroad. This changed, however, in the aftermath of the 11
September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The
divisions between and within political parties on foreign policy reflected a
lack of consensus on what role the US should seek to play in the post-Cold War
world.
These
differences, however, are not new. To some extent they were masked by the
lar-gely bipartisan foreign policy approach during the Cold War but divisions
over foreign policy have been the norm throughout American history. A brief
survey is revealing of such differences.
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