US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era: Restraint Versus Assertiveness from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama

Abstract

For students of American foreign policy, the Cold War provides a pretty big conundrum. For one thing, it was the first time the United States committed to playing a “permanent” global leadership role. For another, America's Cold War strategy was grounded in a conceptually sound doctrine: containment. And even though containment was never as accepted (by the public or policymakers) or unified (as a coherent strategy) as it appears in retrospect, at least it was something. Indeed, for 45 years, containment offered an intellectual blueprint though which the broad strokes of America's military, economic, and cultural (soft power) strategies could be developed—through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Bretton Woods, and the spread of liberal-democratic ideas. Then the Cold War ended. And ever since—brief euphoria over Francis Fukuyama's “End of History” notwithstanding—the United States has been left wandering in search of a grand (or, really, any) strategy. In US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era: Restraint versus Assertiveness from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama, Tudor Onea does not seek to explain America's lack of a post-Cold War grand strategy. Nor, thankfully, does he endeavor to create one. Instead, the “puzzle” Onea sets up is far more limited: why America has been so “assertive” in the post-Cold War world, rather than just kicking back and enjoying the fruits of its dominant, unipolar global position. Onea's cases of “assertiveness” are the familiar ones from the late 1990s and 2000s—Kosovo, Iraq (under both Bill Clinton and George Bush, Jr.), and general unilateralism—which, he says, followed America's brief (and unsuccessful) fling with “restraint” in the early to mid 1990s.