US Foreign Policy Establishment Research Articles

Justification for Interference? The Role of the Monroe Doctrine in the Stigmatization and Legitimation of Intervention in the US Foreign Policy in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Despite the growing academic attention to the problem of interference in internal affairs, rhetorical techniques the state uses to legitimize interventions in the eyes of foreign counterparties, remain somewhat understudied in the Russian IR studies. In this regard, the case of the Monroe Doctrine, a landmark ideological construct in the history of international relations and US foreign policy, provides a unique framework for an in-depth study of the practices of legitimization and stigmatization of interventions. The paper examines the role of the doctrine in denouncing the interference of European powers in the domestic affairs of Latin American countries and justifying US actions in the region. The author outlines a set of issues related to legitimizing, both externally and internally, the actions of the state in the international arena. It is shown that the appeal to national interests suitable for solving the problems of domestic political legitimization, turns out to be ineffective in justifying interventions in the eyes of the international community and therefore gives way to references to established traditions and historical narratives. The paper examines the historical background of the 1823 presidential address and the ways how the US foreign policy establishment appealed to it later on, both to promote the idea of the inadmissibility of European interference in the affairs of the countries of the Western Hemisphere, and, subsequently, to justify American interventionism. Special attention is paid to the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, since it allows one to better understand the specifics of the US leaders’ perception of the Monroe Doctrine and to separate them from the distortions and stereotypes formed during the ensuing public debates and uncritically replicated in many academic studies. The author concludes that, though the Monroe Doctrine is regarded as a cornerstone of US foreign policy, in fact it played a limited role in both diplomatic justification and stigmatization of interventions. In this regard, it is more appropriate to consider it as a rhetorical asset rather than a strict guiding principle. In general, the case of the Monroe Doctrine reveals the situational conditionality of the practices legitimizing interventions, resulting in their limited persuasiveness. The latter seems to be almost inevitable given the constitutive importance of the institution of sovereignty for the maintenance of international society.

Golden Boys, Bros, and Barbecues: Gendered Occidentalism and the Shaping of US Policy in the Middle East

AbstractDrawing on ethnographic and archival research among foreign policy elites in Washington, DC, this article turns attention to the affective gendered and racialized work that shapes US foreign policy. In particular, this article focuses on a form of strategic mimicry I call “gendered Occidentalism,” which has been used by representatives of Persian Gulf states to gain entry into the US foreign policy establishment, and through it, the authoritative power to interpret the “Middle East” for their elite American counterparts. To make this argument, I examine both a historical and contemporary case study, showing the trajectory of this gendered Occidentalism and the ways Gulf policy elites have been able to adapt these affective techniques to align with the changing gendered and racialized norms of the DC establishment. Ultimately, this article considers a more dynamic geopolitical landscape in which less powerful states can—through the affective techniques deployed by their representatives—influence how a hegemonic state like the United States perceives and pursues in its interests abroad. [gender, policy, affect, diplomacy, Middle East]

NatSec Feminism: Women Security Experts and the US Counterterror State

AbstractThis article examines “national security feminism” as it has emerged within the US foreign policy establishment in recent years. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research among security ex...

Why American grand strategy has changed: international constraint, generational shift, and the return of realism

ABSTRACT From Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump: the personalities, rhetoric, and policies of Presidents charged with defining US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era could hardly appear more different. Yet recent treatments of American grand strategy have sought to highlight a lack of debate about grand strategy, and to emphasize groupthink and “habit” within the US foreign policy establishment. This article argues that US grand strategy has changed, and suggests that those who prioritize continuities rely on an overly restrictive definition of grand strategy. Employing policy paradigms as an analytical framework, this paper finds significant variation in US grand strategy across the four post-Cold War presidencies. Where the variation between Clinton and George W. Bush’s presidencies can be explained by differing strategic ideas among American foreign policymaking elites, a trend towards less active hegemonic management running through the Obama and Trump presidencies is more structural in nature, reflecting both international constraints and generational change.

American Foreign Policy in the Age of Donald Trump

Often the best predictor of a new US president’s foreign policy is to look at his predecessor. Yet each president does leave his impact on American foreign policy. Donald Trump came to office with no government or foreign policy experience and his presidential campaign rhetoric suggested significant changes in a US foreign policy, which he described as “America First.” This article examines Trump’s foreign policy after nearly three years both in terms of how it is made and across three levels—interests, strategy, and tactics. The argument is that while Trump’s foreign policy shares many continuities with his predecessors, there are notable differences, especially in terms of how it is made and the conflict between his intensely personal style and the control the US foreign policy establishment has over him. Finally, any permanent changes in US foreign policy beyond Trump may have more to do with larger shifts in a world that is no longer dominated by the US.

From the Obama Doctrine to America First: the erosion of the Washington consensus on grand strategy

This article explores the social construction of American grand strategy as nexus of identity and national security. The article first highlights how the identity construct of American exceptionalism has underwritten a grand strategy of global leadership and military interventionism since the end of the Cold War, constituting liberal hegemony as dominant position within the bipartisan US foreign policy establishment. The article then explores the political impact of counter-hegemonic discourses of restraint and offshore balancing under the Obama presidency. It argues that in ‘leading from behind’ the Obama Doctrine represented a moderate intra-elite challenge to the status quo. Obama’s use of exceptionalist rhetoric to legitimate restraint simultaneously exposed the political limits of this strategic paradigm shift, which oscillated between continuity and change. Finally, the article examines Trump’s ‘America First’ stance, concluding that its combination of nationalism, nativism, and protectionism has resulted in the erosion of the Washington consensus on liberal hegemony.

From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy Sarah B. Snyder

Reviewed by: From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy Sarah B. Snyder Debbie Sharnak (bio) Sarah B. Snyder From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), ISBN, 978-0-231-16947-9, 320 pages. The history of human rights, perhaps surprisingly, emerged relatively recently as a field of scholarly inquiry.1 Historians began publishing widely on the topic only in the past decade and, as historian Barbara Keys noted, scholars of US foreign relations have been "among the most avid" contributors to fill the void in this burgeoning field.2 Sarah Snyder became one such pioneer in 2011 when she published her first book, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network.3 In that volume, Snyder examines how non-state actors used the passage of the Helsinki Act of 1975 to promote a human rights agenda as a central element in East-West diplomacy, which helped lead to the end of the Cold War. In her latest book, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy, Snyder looks again to nonstate actors to examine how human rights emerged—this time as a central part of the US foreign policymaking apparatus. Eschewing claims from Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia that human rights' true rise can be traced to the 1970s, Snyder is part of a group of historians, which includes Steven L.B Jensen and Roland Burke, who are looking to the 1960s to locate the origins of [End Page 527] modern human rights.4 While Jensen and Burke are more concerned with global events in their analyses of the earlier decade, the former examining the impact of decolonization and the latter looking to the terminal years of liberal postcolonialism, Snyder focuses on how US nonstate actors and low level diplomats played a pivotal role in bringing human rights to the forefront of US policymaking, and how their actions continues to have lasting relevance. With this project, Snyder contests the prevailing emphasis on Jimmy Carter's presidential anointment that "our commitment to human rights must be absolute" to locate when human rights had finally arrived on the US foreign policy scene. Instead, Snyder shows how a diverse set of activists, missionaries, academics, and bureaucrats laid the groundwork for Carter's inaugural claims in the "long 1960s"—a period she defines as John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 through the end of Gerald Ford's presidency in January 1977. By investigating various actors' personal connections, racial identity, and transnational ties in a diverse set of ideological and geographical case studies, she argues that the long 1960s set the stage for the "institutionalization of human rights in US foreign policy and the expansion of human rights activism" in subsequent decades.5 In reexamining the temporal origins of human rights in US foreign policy, Snyder also points to an important geographic shift that occurred, which re-centered human rights activism in the US from New York to Washington DC in the 1960s. As Snyder explains, this change is significant because it shows how activists who cared about global rights stopped appealing to the United Nations and foreign governments to advocate for moral claims abroad. Instead, their frustration and disillusionment with a UN-centered approach led them to see the US as an important arbiter that could marshal its power in support of human rights to effect change. These two important historiographical contributions are illustrated through diverse emblematic case studies. Chapter one examines how human rights became an issue in US-Soviet relations. According to Snyder, pressure on the US foreign policy establishment arose from personal ties—particularly Soviet-Jewish connections—that led to the formation of NGOs, student groups, and mass demonstrations around the issue. This mobilization ended in Senator Henry Jackson's push to pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which limited trade with communist countries that restricted freedom of emigration and other human rights abuses. In Chapter Two, Snyder focuses on Africa, studying American activism against Southern Rhodesia's minority-ruled, racially discriminatory government. In this context, US citizens...

Trump’s National Security Strategy: “America First” meets the establishment

Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) promises to put “America first.” However, it is only a partial break from convention, and evinces a deep current of incoherence in Trump’s foreign policy. The NSS attempts to combine two incompatible worldviews into a single doctrine: the president’s “America First” nationalism and the seventy-year-old internationalist consensus among the US foreign policy establishment. Not only does it betray strategic dissonance, it portends an impossible working relationship between Trump’s insurgent nationalism and the traditionalism of the US foreign policy bureaucracy.

The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?

This article argues that the biggest challenges facing the post-1945 liberal international order are the need to genuinely embrace ethno-racial diversity and to reduce class-based inequalities. However, this is problematic because the liberal international order's core foundational principles, and principal underpinning ‘theory’ (liberal internationalism), are Eurocentric, elitist and resistant to change. Those core principles are subliminally racialized, elitist and imperial. They are embedded in post-1945 international institutions, elite mindsets, and in the institutions of the US foreign policy establishment—which are seeking to incorporate emerging power elites, willingly, into the US-led order. As illustration, this article considers examples that bookend the US-led system: wartime elite planning for global leadership; the role of the United Nations in Korea from 1945 to 1953, where it served as the primary instrument for the creation and incorporation of (South) Korea into the US-led order; and several US state-linked initiatives in China over the past several decades, including the Ford Foundation. The article compares the contemporary and historical evidence to liberal internationalist claims, as well as to claims implied by work on ‘ultra-imperialism’, based on Karl Kautsky's and Antonio Gramsci's ideas of hegemony. The article concludes that elite incorporation—by a combination of coercion, attraction and socialization—is the principal goal of the US-led order, as opposed to embracing diversity and moving towards genuine change felt at a mass level. Hence, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen.

TRANSATLANTIC TWILIGHT? THE IMPACT OF THE MUELLER INVESTIGATION ON US-EUROPE RELATIONS

The Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the US 2016 Presidential election has dogged the Trump administration, almost from the beginning of its time in office. The impact of the probe is widespread and affecting the United States in myriad ways both domestically and in foreign policy. We contend that, regarding US-European relations, the Mueller investigation is hastening two broad trends. Firstly, the continuing revelations are pushing the traditional US foreign policy establishment closer towards Europe. Secondly, and simultaneously, these revelations, as well as the continued actions of the President himself, are acting as a source of tension in US-European relations that are pushing European elites into awkward policy choices. The Mueller investigation has uncovered an ill-defined Russian strategy of sowing discord during the 2016 election cycle, matching other initiatives in Europe itself. In the rhetoric of prominent American politicians, it has succeeded. Donald Trump has been loath - unlike his verboseness towards the majority of the US's traditional allies - to criticise the Russian state. Meanwhile, the US Congress has tightened sanctions against Russia. While Trump has distanced himself from the European Union on issues such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Iranian Nuclear Deal, other parts of the US polity – from city to mayors to state governors and Congress itself – have sought to reinforce relationships with European countries. The forthcoming 2018 midterm Congressional elections are likely to result in an exacerbation of the process, particularly if there are further allegations of Russian cyber-attacks. The impact on European leaders is varied. Whereas the German government wants to push ahead with a new gas pipeline, which would increase reliance on Russian energy supplies, the EU has thus far held firm over sanctions and presented a united front denouncing the alleged Russian state-sponsored use of a nerve agent in Britain. This paper will aim to explore the impact of the Mueller investigation on these two trends and the effect on wider US-European relations.

Conceptualising and historicising the US foreign policy establishment in a racialised class structure

In recent years critical scholars of US foreign policy have challenged the mainstream paradigm that fails to account for the racial dimensions of international relations. This article introduces a conceptual and historical analysis of the US foreign policy establishment that posits race and racism at its centre. While alluding to conventional theories of American power such as pluralism and statism, the article also highlights classical Marxism’s failure to acknowledge that US exceptionalism and racism conjoined in a manner that conferred a racial dimension to class politics. The article argues that the US foreign policy establishment has been presided over by an elite or ruling elite; and irrespective of challenges from below, increasing diversity, or the insistence that America is a meritocratic classless society, the US establishment is at heart, elitist, racialised and generally Anglo-centric. The article identifies links between the racial dimensions of US foreign policy and the identity profile of the power elite. The paper extends and critiques C. Wright Mills’ definition of the power elite by mapping its racial dimension. Finally, the article argues that although the election of Obama represented a more inclusive and cosmopolitan version of the establishment, Obama’s presence has helped to consolidate the status quo as the structural constraints on the executive branch and symbolism associated with the election of the first African American president has generally silenced the Left and quietly fostered the suggestion that an unconventional identity profile will not necessarily result in the change we can believe in.

The US foreign policy establishment and grand strategy: how American elites obstruct strategic adjustment

In this article, I demonstrate that there are compelling reasons why the USA should reconsider its current grand strategy—variously described as primacy or deep engagement—and, instead, adopt a less activist strategy such as offshore balancing, or restraint. The most salient reason for the USA to make a change of direction is that its current strategy has set the USA on a collision course with China. Nevertheless, the American foreign policy establishment is resistant to strategic adjustment. In this article, I offer a two-pronged explanation for this resistance. First, the American foreign policy establishment imposes a broadly uniform world view on those who comprise it. In this sense, the foreign policy establishment’s very existence is a barrier to strategic adjustment. Second, the foreign policy establishment’s preferences invariably prevail because it exercises discourse dominance, which allows it to frame issues, and to set the bounds of discussion by signaling to a wider audience what policy positions are legitimate, and, perhaps even more important, which are not. In this article, I begin by discussing how the American foreign policy establishment’s members are recruited, and focus on its links to America’s corporate and financial elite. Then, I lay out the key elements of the foreign policy establishment’s world views. I show how the foreign policy establishment uses discourse dominance to ensure that US grand strategy reflects its core beliefs about America’s international political role. Finally, I demonstrate that with respect to China, the foreign policy establishment’s world view, and the discursive practices it employs, make it unlikely that the USA will be able peacefully to accommodate China’s rise.

“… ‘a foundation-hatched black’: Obama, the US establishment, and foreign policy”

US foreign policy has a largely unacknowledged racial dimension due to the racial characteristics of the US foreign policy establishment, and in shared mindsets in a soon-to-be ‘majority-minority’ nation. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) racial-ethnic and class factors produce managed change through socialisation in an attenuated meritocratic order, adapting to challenges to elite dominance by incorporating rising talent, without altering broader patterns of power. The greatest success of such a system would be the assimilation of the most elite minority individuals, even as the bulk of those groups’ members continue to experience discrimination. Such success would be compounded by election to the highest office of a minority US president extolling the virtues of post-racial politics. President Barack Obama represents a ‘Wasp-ified’ black elite, assimilated into the extant structures of power that remain wedded to a more secular, non-biologically-racial, version of Anglo-Saxonism or, more broadly, liberal internationalism. Hence, it should occasion little surprise that there has been so little change in US foreign policies.

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

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.

The Ambivalences of Power: Launching the American Journal of International Law in an Era of Empire and Globalization

This article uses the first issue of the American Journal of International Law, one hundred years after its creation in 1907, to analyse the state of American international legal thought following the acquisition of Pacific and Caribbean island territories in the Spanish–American War and the creation of a new international identity. Traditionally, the American Society of International Law (of which the journal was the organ) has been placed in the context of the US peace movement. However, both the society and the journal were led by individuals occupying major positions in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt and earlier administrations, including the sitting and a former secretary of war. The society and its journal were vehicles of the US foreign policy establishment. Despite a mixture of imperialists and anti-imperialists, a cultural coherence is discernable in the journal's pages. In essence, the journal can be placed within what the article calls the genteel tradition of US international law, involving an effort at educating the public away from over-excitement, adopting science in the newly professionalized administrative state, and advocating an arbitrational model of legal ordering to promote international peace.

Transnational Hegemony and US Labor Foreign Policy: Towards a Gramscian International Labor Geography

In this paper I explore the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in analyzing the relationships between US labor unions, the US foreign policy establishment, and workers in the global South. The hegemonic position of US capitalists, in relation to both US workers and states in the global South, heavily conditioned the development of American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations foreign policy during the cold war, with path-dependent effects that have carried over into the post-cold-war era of ‘globalization’. Although recent changes in the relationships between US capitalists and US labor unions have undermined the US ‘labor accord’ that reigned during the cold war, the new, ascendant transnational neoliberal hegemony has not as yet completely transformed the relationships of labor unions in the United States to those elsewhere in the world, which poses ongoing challenges for international labor solidarity, even in a context of new possibilities.

Visions of empire. Changing American perspectives on Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia between 1920 and 1942

The impact of American diplomatic pressure on the Indonesian struggle for independence after world war II was controversial. Some Dutch government officials, civil servants, or ordinary residents of the former Dutch East Indies have deplored the American record of ignorance about the particularity of Dutch colonial society in Southeast Asia, and many amongst them have faulted Americans for advocating a capricious and simplistic anti-colonialism that wreaked havoc in post-war Indonesia and elsewhere. A few, in fact, have complained bitterly about the political constraints imposed upon the Dutch nation by the outside world, especially by the US foreign policy establishment and the United Nations, which neither 'trusted nor understood us and forced us to take a course of action which was not of our own choosing'. However, American policies towards the decolonization of Indonesia during the years following the second world war did not emerge in a vacuum. Accordingly, in this essay I wish to explore the evolution of American diplomats' views regarding Dutch colonial rule in Southeast Asia between the early 1920s and 1942, the year the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies. Through an examination of the steady stream of reports which US diplomats in Batavia, Medan, and Soerabaya transmitted to the Department of State in Washington DC, one can gain insights into the official perceptions and popular stereotypes that shaped Americans' understanding of Dutch colonial rule. After all, the formulation of US foreign policy — as was true for die diplomatic relations of many other democratic nations — relied not only on 'perceptions of the official mind' but also heeded an array of more nebulous public opinions. Even though the US consuls' dispatches about the social and political situation of the Dutch East Indies had only minimal impact on the actual implementation of US foreign policy in me Pacific, which was crafted primarily in the corridors of power in the White House and the State Department in Washington DC, their reports mirrored fluctuations in both official and popular attitudes. In general, diplomats in the field tried to respond to the issues that most preoccupied their superiors, while their correspondence also echoed changes in public sentiments regarding either Dutch colonialism or European imperialism in general.

Elites, Public Opinion, and Empire: On Lions, Foxes and Mass Politics in the Post-Vietnam Era

This essay analyzes the replacement of ‘managerialism’ with ‘militarism’ as the dominant ideology within the US foreign policy establishment. At issue for both sides in the post-Vietnam power struggle was how best to combat centrifugal forces at work in the international order that threatened further erosion of the US empire. The resolution of the debate in favor of “containment militarism,” the paper contends, emerged from a decisive shift in the domestic political climate that, after a brief interregnum, restored US foreign policy to its familiar adversary role vis-a-vis global reform and transformation. In support of this thesis, the essay focuses attention on the “Soviet threat” mobilization campaign of the elite Committee On The Present Danger (CPD). As the parameters of policy debate moved steadily to the right during Carter's term in office, the Administration's rhetoric and doctrine evolved accordingly from global interdependence to global confrontation. The paper argues that the deepening crisis of capital accumulation acted as an added constraint on Carter, which, in combination with the domestic mood, forced abandonment of managerialism and with it all pretense of elite reform. It concludes by suggesting that the political impetus for meaningful global reform will have to come from a popular democratic movement. Conversely, the domestic concerns of the latter can only be realized in a world beyond empire.

Dr. Kissinger’s Asia

CURRENT United States policy in Asia, in the large view, appears relatively simple in its ideological origins. It is an attempt to limit the American commitment by creating an equilibrium based on a balance of forces within the area itself and among the superpowers (and emerging superpowers). Were this to be successful, it would lead to a new stability one, it might be argued, that World War II and the Korean War could not guarantee for even a decade. At the moment, the sought-for balance is extremely precarious. In fact, the attempt to create it by the aggressive and what might almost be called revolutionary diplomacy of the Nixon Administration presumably to a major extent the product of the fertile and innovative mind of Dr. Henry Kissinger has produced a massive discombobulation in Asia. To understand the present situation, and the prospects for an interplay of forces that might produce stability, requires some analysis of conditions in the various countries of the area. Such an analysis must be prefaced with some fairly obvious but important comments on the state of current historical investigation. In another time and place, they would seem not only perfunctory but condescending. They are made necessary here by the orgy of pseudocriticism now being indulged in both by the popular press and by some of the most respected spokesmen of the US foreign policy establishment. It goes without saying that all history writing is revisionist. But it has now become a fad to try to discredit what one of the major figures of the movement, John Kenneth Galbraith, calls traditional wisdom for its own sake. In many cases, it just may be that the main currents of opinion in recent decades, even official opinion, were justified; and that some of the revisionist historians are simply panderers to the continual demands for novelty by the mass media. Thus one finds, for example, distinguished journals of foreign policy opinion publishing articles on what might have happened had