Foreign policy fusion: Liberal interventionists, conservative nationalists and neoconservatives — the new alliance dominating the US foreign policy establishment

Abstract

Several tendencies in US foreign policy politics generated a new foreign policy consensus set to outlast the Bush administration. Three developments are analysed: increasing influence of conservative organizations – such as the Heritage Foundation, and of neoconservatism; and, particularly, democratic peace theory-inspired liberal interventionism. 9-11 fused those three developments, though each tendency retained its ‘sphere of action’: Right and Left appear to have forged an historically effective ideology of global intervention, an enduring new configuration of power. This paper analyses a key liberal interventionists' initiative – the Princeton Project on National Security – that sits at the heart of thinking among centrists, liberal and conservative alike. This paper also assesses the efficacy of the new consensus by exploring the foreign policy positions and advisers of President-elect Barack Obama and his defeated Republican rival, Senator John McCain, concluding that the new president is unlikely significantly to change US foreign policy.