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The Malaise of American Foreign Policy: Relating Past to Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

George H. Quester
George H. Quester
Affiliation:
Professor of Government at Cornell University and Director of its Peace Studies Program
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Abstract

The “malaise” or inward-turning of American foreign policy is not well explained by any simple cyclical pattern, and also not by any relaxing balance-of-power in the outside world. A more important explanation may be that since 1967 we have lost our earlier confidence that the American model of political democracy would serve the happiness of peoples everywhere. Stanley Hoffmann's Primacy or World Order does not lament the fading of this confidence, but offers a fourth analysis: that international complications now require that American foreign policy be directed toward world order. Yet Hoffmann can be accused of tending to tailor “world order” to fit a preference for economic democracy over traditional liberal values. George Liska's Career of Empire presents a more resigned view of the inward turning of American foreign policy, coming perhaps closest to the first or second of the explanations noted above, but remaining therefore relatively devoid of policy recommendations.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , October 1980 , pp. 82 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1980

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References

1 Klingberg, , “The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy,” World Politics, IV (January 1952), 239–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For a very stimulating, but in retrospect perhaps too optimistic, account of such a process, see Brown, Seyom, New Forces in World Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1974).Google Scholar

3 A good illustration of a much more worried view than that presented by Hoffmann may be found in Nitze, Paul H., “Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 54 (January 1976), 207–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 The outlines of a comparable interpretation of the changes in American foreign policy are presented in Ullman, Richard H., “The Foreign World and Ourselves: Washington, Wilson, and the Democratic Dilemma,” Foreign Policy, No. 21 (Winter 1975/1976). 99–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The most interesting discussion of this American world view may be that of Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).Google Scholar

6 See the discussion in Kristol, , “Consensus and Dissent in U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Lake, Anthony, ed., The Vietnam Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 80–101.Google Scholar

7 For some very recent public opinion data on American attitudes toward foreign policy, see Rielly, John E., “The American Mood: A Foreign Policy of Self-Interest,” Foreign Policy, No. 34 (Spring 1979), 74–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The focus on the demands of world order is of course hardly new. For an interesting expansion of this theme, see Sprout, Harold and Sprout, Margaret, Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971).Google Scholar

9 For some very skeptical comments on the primacy of economic considerations in international politics, see Hoffmann, , Gulliver's Troubles (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 120–22, 131–32.Google Scholar

10 Hoffmann quite explicitly acknowledges his debt to Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).

11 A very thoughtful and balanced discussion of the complexities of the human rights issue may be found in Birnbaum, Karl, “Human Rights and East-West Relations,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 55 (July 1977), 783–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 The translation of the emerging need for world order into a set of policy preferences can surely come out in different ways; see, for example, Bell, Daniel, “The Future World Disorder: The Structural Context of Crises,” Foreign Policy, No. 27 (Summer 1977), 109–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an account presenting yet another set of perspectives, perhaps less easily coded ideologically, see Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “America in a Hostile World,” Foreign Policy, No. 23 (Summer 1976), 65–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 The most persuasive overall discussions of American foreign policy between World War II and Vietnam may be found in Ulam, Adam, The Rivals (New York: Viking Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and Aron, Raymond, The Imperial Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1974).Google Scholar See also Hammond, Paul Y., Cold War and Détente (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).Google Scholar

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