Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T05:17:04.941Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The United States In, or Against, the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

James Cronin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , 2010 , pp. 114 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 There were at least three key texts in which the new ‘Bush doctrine’ was laid out. The first was Bush's State of the Union Speech, 29 January 2002, in which the president began by proclaiming that ‘the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers’ and proceeded to argue that Iraq, Iran and North Korea ‘and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil’. The second was his Commencement Address at West Point on 1 June 2002, where he talked of ‘new threats’ requiring ‘new thinking’ and strategies that would be less reactive and more aggressive. The ‘war on terror’, he claimed, ‘will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.’ The commitment to an aggressive, indeed pre-emptive, strategy was made official a short time later in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, issued by the Bush White House in September 2002. For a thoughtful analysis, see Daalder, Ivo and Lindsay, James, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley, 2005 Google Scholar.

2 The term is used by Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, p. 14, who also insist that the key to Bush foreign policy was not the influence of the neoconservatives, who tended to work outside government, but of more traditional conservatives –‘assertive nationalists’ such as Cheney and Rumsfeld – who found themselves agreeing with, and making use of, neoconservatives and their ideas. There is a very large literature on the Wilsonian and liberal traditions. For recent and important contributions, see Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007 Google Scholar; and Borgwardt, Elizabeth, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press at Harvard University, 2005 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 In addition to Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound, see Mann, James, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, New York, Viking, 2004 Google Scholar; and Halper, Stefan and Clarke, Jonathan, America Alone: The Neo-conservatives and the Global Order, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2006, is a clear expression of the second thoughts of many neoconservatives; Tony Smith, Pact with the Devil: Washington's Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise, London, Routledge, 2007, is a critique of how neoconservatives and others misused the arguments that people such as Smith himself had made in, for example, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994. Michael Ignatieff might have done the quickest rethink: he published Empire Lite: Nation-building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, London and Toronto, Vintage and Penguin, 2003, but the book seems not to have appeared in a US edition. His formal mea culpa appeared somewhat later, as ‘Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment’, New York Times Magazine, 5 August 2007. There has been much criticism of the failure of the press and of public intellectuals to challenge the Bush administration and its policies, especially in Iraq. See Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing, New York, Basic, 2007; and Tony Judt, ‘Bush's Useful Idiots’, London Review of Books, 21 September 2006. Given the failures that attended Bush's foreign policies, such arguments seem entirely appropriate; whether things were so clear, or should have been so clear, in 2001 or 2003 is an historical issue that might not be resolved so easily.

5 Maier, Charles, ‘Beyond Statecraft’, in Leffler, Melvyn and Legro, Jeffrey (eds), To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 62 Google Scholar.

6 Lynch, T. and Singh, R., After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a similar effort, see Kaufman, Robert, In Defense of the Bush Doctrine, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2007 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 They are referring here to Lieven, Anatol and Hulsman, John, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World, London, Pantheon, 2006 Google Scholar.

8 Lynch and Singh, After Bush, p. 86. Lynch and Singh also feel compelled to defend the Bush administration on virtually every front, from its record on civil liberties to its decision to rely on private contractors for much of the reconstruction of Iraq. Though they several times acknowledge the mistakes in the policies of the occupation and their implementation, they nevertheless commend the Bush administration for ‘allowing entrepreneurs to risk their capital and lives for material reward…’. ‘Halliburton's financial outlay in and return from Iraq’, they proceed to explain, ‘was in accord with a foreign policy tradition which has consistently prized commercial risk and the social benefits that follow in its wake’, ibid., p. 34.

9 See, for example, Ole Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, revised edn, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2004; Benjamin Page, with Marshall Mouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leader But Don't Get, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006; and Richard Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on US Foreign Policy since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus, New York, Oxford University Press, 2001. Some, like Page, go further and argue that public opinion is more sensible than elite opinion. None of these studies or the data they muster lends support to arguments to the effect that the US public has moved decisively to the right or is in the grip of fundamentalist reaction. A more careful analysis of recent events suggests, however, that the practice of ‘wedge politics’ in which the focus on non-economic issues such as national security produces disproportionate returns in a polarized electorate by moving only a modest number of voters may go some way towards explaining the policies of the Bush administration. See Snyder, Jack, Shapiro, Robert and Bloch-Elchon, Yaeli, ‘Free Hand Abroad, Divide and Rule at Home’, World Politics, 61: 1 (2009), pp. 155–87.CrossRefGoogle ScholarA roughly similar argument, stressing the contingent and political origins of America's recent aggressive unilateralism – and its negative economic effects – is Hopkins, A. G., ‘Capitalism, Nationalism, and the New American Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35: 1 (2007), pp. 95–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Melvyn Leffler and Jeffrey Legro, ‘Dilemmas of Strategy’, in Leffler amd Legro, To Lead the World, pp. 257–8.

11 Data come from the World Public Opinion website, www.worldpublicopinion.org, accessed 10 April 2009. The organization makes available data from a wide range of sources, especially Gallup, the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, the German Marshall Fund and PIPA's own surveys. There is also, of course, a substantial scholarly literature. See, for example, Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy; Page, with Mouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect; and Sobel, The Impact of Public Opinion on US Foreign Policy since Vietnam. Emphases differ, but these studies tend to agree that public opinion on matters of US foreign policy is rational, that it favours engagement with the world, that it is cautious and constrains if not determines what government can do.

12 Lynch and Singh, After Bush, pp. 94–5.

13 Ibid., pp. 126–7.

14 See Suskind, Ron, The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies since 9/11, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006 Google Scholar.

15 Lynch and Singh, After Bush, p. 24.

16 See Armitage, David, The Declaration of Independence; A Global History, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 35–7, 60–1, on the centrality of commerce in the nation's founding documentyGoogle Scholar.

17 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1986, quoted in Lynch and Singh, After Bush, p. 21.

18 A useful collection that illustrates the point would be Michael Hogan (ed.), The Ambiguous Legacy: United States Foreign Policy in the ‘American Century’, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000. See also Thomas McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; and Lloyd Gardner, A Covenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984. The big exception is John Lewis Gaddis: see, among other titles, his The Cold War: A New History, New York, Penguin, 2005.

19 See Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1946–2006, 10th edn, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2006.

20 LaFeber, Walter, ‘The Bush Doctrine’, Diplomatic History, 26: 4 (2002), p. 549.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This was a special issue of the journal devoted to 9/11 and its aftermath. The essays would have been written in the spring of 2002, presumably prior to Bush's address at West Point and long before the publication of the new US National Security Strategy document in September 2002.

21 See Melvyn Leffler, ‘9/11 and American Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History, 29: 3 (2005), pp. 395–414, and his ‘Reply’ to critics, pp. 441–4.

22 Hunt, Michael H., ‘In the Wake of September 11: The Clash of What?’, Journal of American History, 89: 2 (2002), pp. 416–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, New York, Knopf, 2001. For a comparable approach, see Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1997; and also Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation, New York, Knopf, 2006, who focuses on the nineteenth century but promises more.

24 Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World, New York, Knopf, 2007. For a more extensive review and critique, see Cronin, James, ‘ “Special” Yes, But When and Why?’, Political Quarterly, 79: 3 (2008), pp. 438–42.Google Scholar

25 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1987, 2009, p. 199. In the new ‘Afterword’, Hunt reviews a wide variety of scholarship that he now regards as important in understanding the ideology surrounding foreign policy, but in the process his argument seems much diluted. Probably the most sophisticated work on the role on US beliefs in politics, including foreign policy, is Michael Foley's recent American Credo: The Place of Ideas in US Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, but his list of key elements is still longer, with nine key ‘elements’ that combine to create six ‘compounds’ that are broad and diverse and contested enough to allow a wide array of arguments and conflicts. ‘As a consequence’, Foley argues, ‘Americans have developed a remarkable facility not only for injecting multiple principles into political discussion but also for identifying and underlining the tensions that can exist between them’, p. 468. In addition to Foley and Hunt, see also Anatol Lieven, America: Right or Wrong, London, HarperCollins, 2004, on American nationalism. On America as an empire based on consumption, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2005. This would seem a rather more benign form of domination than the term usually implies.

26 The argument about whether to regard the US as an empire is, of course, a recurring one. I would argue that while the term captures many aspects of the American past, it also obscures the very real differences between that experience and what empire looked like elsewhere. This point was made forcefully some years ago in the contributions to Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, London, Allen & Unwin, 1986, especially in the essays by Klaus Schwabel on the United States and Ronald Robinson on the ‘excentric idea of imperialism’. See also Tony Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-industrializing World since 1815, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. For a useful review of the debate about the new US imperialism, if such it is, see Cox, Michael, ‘Empire by Denial: The Strange Case of the United States’, International Affairs, 81: 1 (2005), pp. 15–30;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and also the thoughtful contributions to the ‘Forum on the American Empire’, in the Review of International Studies, 30: 4 (2004): Michael Cox, ‘Empire, Imperialism and the Bush Doctrine’, pp. 585–608; G. John Ikenberry, ‘Liberalism and Empire: Logics of Order in the American Unipolar Age’, pp. 609–30; and Michael Mann, ‘The First Failed Empire of the 21st Century’, pp. 631–53 (see also Michael Mann's Incoherent Empire, London, Verso, 2003). To simplify three complex arguments, Cox finds it useful to regard the United States as an imperial power, Ikenberry thinks it is not and Mann feels that whatever American leaders may wish, empire is impossible in the current era of nation-states and anti-colonialism. The term has become ubiquitous in contemporary discourse primarily because it is embraced by both advocates and critics of American empire – see, for example, Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, New York, Penguin, 2004, who wants more of it but doubts America's ability to persist in the project; Ignatieff, Empire Lite, who regrets its necessity and agonizes over its tactics; Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002, who dislikes it; and Richard Falk, The Decline of World Order: America's Imperial Geopolitics, London, Routledge, 2004, who believes it portends a ‘global fascism’ and so wants none of it. It is of course unobjectionable to use the term as a metaphor for what is certainly a preponderance of power, but as an analytical term it is seriously lacking in precision and historical accuracy, as Eric Hobsbawm – no friend of empire or US hegemony – has recently pointed out. See Hobsbawm, ‘Why America's Hegemony Differs from Britain's Empire’, Massey Lectures on American Empire in Global Perspective, Harvard University, 19 October 2005, reprinted in E. Hobsbawm, Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism, London, Little, Brown, 2007, pp. 49–73. See, in addition, Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2006; Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007; and also Bruce Cummings, ‘Still the American Century’, in Michael Cox, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds), The Interregnum: Controversies in World Politics, 1989–1999, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 271–99. Maier and Hunt prefer the term ‘ascendancy’, Cummings ‘liberal hegemony’. For a useful collection of views on empire and the US experience, see Andrew Bacevich (ed.), The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire, Chicago, Ivan Dee, 2003. The fascination with empires and imperial transitions has elicited a growing literature. See, among others, John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, London, Allen Lane, 2007; Harold James, The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006; and Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Domination – and Why they Fall, New York, Doubleday, 2007. For comparisons between the British empire and that of the United States, which these days seem to find the former less objectionable or at least less powerful in its time, see O'Brien, Patrick, ‘The Myth of Anglophone Succession’, New Left Review, 24 (2003), pp. 113–34;Google Scholar Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, American and the World, London, Yale University Press, 2006; and Hobsbawm, ‘Why America's Hegemony Differs’. An earlier effort was Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, New York, Vintage, 1987, which popularized the concept of ‘imperial overstretch’, which did not quite work for the 1980s but might seem especially appropriate for the most recent era in the history of American foreign policy. For an interesting and forceful argument to the effect that ‘Marxist and radical-left interpretations of imperialism have limited explanatory power’ in understanding recent US policy abroad, the war in Iraq especially, see Hopkins, ‘Capitalism, Nationalism, and the New American Empire’.

27 William Appelman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Cleveland, World Publishing, 1959.

28 Williams continues to inspire. See, for example, Thomas McCormick, ‘What Would William Appelman Williams Say Now?’, History News Network, 24 September 2007.

29 Bacevich, American Empire.

30 Ibid., pp. 2, 3.

31 Bacevich's military background also allows him to integrate military history into foreign policy far better than most. See, for example, A. Bacevich (ed.), The Long War: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007; and also A. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.

32 On the course of recent research on American foreign policy, see Hogan, Michael and Paterson, Thomas (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd edn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and also Hogan, Ambiguous Legacy. The most important effort to take the history of the Cold War up to its ending is Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 On the link between the institutions surrounding and constraints controlling capitalism and the success of the post-war growth regime in Europe, see Eichengreen, Barry, The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Scholar.

34 See Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006; and Ruggie, John, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization, 36 (1982), pp. 379–415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Though his work on ideology is more concerned with enduring or recurring themes, Michael Hunt has a good sense of the distinctiveness of this ‘neoliberal’ era in American foreign policy. See his The American Ascendancy, ch. 8, ‘The Neoliberal Triumph’.

36 For a fuller exposition, see James Cronin, Markets, Rights and Power: The Rise (and Fall?) of the Anglo-American Vision of World Order, 1975–2005, Working Paper Series 164, Harvard, CT, Center for European Studies, 2008.

37 Foley, American Credo, p. 466.

38 Lynch and Singh claim that none of the top ten international relations scholars in the USA supported Bush administration policies. See After Bush, pp. 99, 314.

39 Gans, Herbert, Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together After Bush, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2008 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 The key text, but it is one of many, is Peter Hall and David Soskic (eds), The Varieties of Capitalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

41 See, for example, Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, who argues that the range of institutional ties between the USA and the rest of the world is much greater than is commonly understood and that multilateral commitments are now embedded in the way we do all sorts of business.

42 Jeffrey Kopstein and Sven Steinmo (eds), Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cf. also Charles Jones, American Civilization, London and Washington, DC, Institute for the Study of the Americas and Brookings Institution Press, 2007, for whom the relevant comparison for the United States, its society and values, is the rest of America; and for the most comprehensive review of the data on the USA and Europe, Peter Baldwin, The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.

43 The greater religiosity of Americans has been a staple of much commentary on the differences between the USA and the rest of the developed world, especially in foreign policy. See, for example, Tariq Ali, Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, London, Verso, 2002. The data provide little support for such a crude comparison: see Steven Pfaff, ‘The Religious Divide: Why Religion Seems to be Thriving in the United States and Waning in Europe’, in Kopstein and Steinmo, Growing Apart, pp. 24–52; and also Alan Wolfe's more anecdotal but useful account, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live our Faith, New York, The Free Press, 2003. For a comprehensive review, see Foley, American Credo, ch. 7, ‘Morality’.

44 See Bobrow, David, ‘International Public Opinion: Incentives and Options to Comply and Challenge’, in Bobrow, D. (ed.), Hegemony Constrained: Evasion, Modification and Resistance to American Foreign Policy, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008 Google Scholar.

45 The blurb introducing Growing Apart proclaims the book's aim as being ‘to unite the international relations scholarship on transatlantic relations with the comparative politics literature on the varieties of capitalism’. The essays are typically very good, but they do not quite add up to this.

46 Walt, Stephen, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy, New York, Norton, 2005 Google Scholar.

47 Perhaps the most prominent effort has been undertaken at Princeton, but the Brookings Institution has been active, as have other think tanks. See, for example, G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World Under Law and Liberty: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006; and, for the group meeting under the auspices of Brookings, see Ivo Daalder, Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World, Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2007.

48 See the books already cited as well as the following: Robert Silvers (ed.), The Consequences to Come: American Power after Bush, New York, New York Review of Books, 2008; Jeffrey Anderson, G. John Ikenberry and Thomas Risse (eds), The End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2008; Fareed Zakaria, ‘The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest’, Foreign Affairs (May/June 2008), pp. 18–43; Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World, New York, Norton, 2008; Richard Haass, ‘The Age of Nonpolarity: What Will Follow U.S. Dominance’, Foreign Affairs (May/June 2008), pp. 44–56; Richard Haass, The Opportunity: America's Moment to Alter History's Course, New York, Public Affairs Press, 2005; Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, New York, Basic Books, 2008; and Freedman, Lawrence, ‘The Transatlantic Agenda: Vision and Counter-Vision’, Survival, 47: 4 (2005), pp. 19–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The list of relevant books and articles expands constantly.

49 Bobrow, Hegemony Constrained.

50 The main exceptions are two essays in Leffler and Legro, To Lead the World– Barry Eichengreen and Douglas Irwin, ‘A Shackled Hegemon’, pp. 181–203; and Niall Ferguson, ‘The Problem of Conjecture’, pp. 227–49. These were of course written well before the crisis hit in the autumn of 2008 and so tended to be concerned with other, more long-term, phenomena.