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33 1 Jeremi Suri The strange career of nation-building as a concept in US foreign policy The people of the South should be the last Americans to expect indefinite continuity of their institutions and social arrangements. Other Americans have less reason to be prepared for sudden change and lost causes. Apart from Southerners, Americans have enjoyed a historical continuity that is unique among modern peoples. The stream of national history, flowing down from seventeenth-century sources, reaches a fairly level plain in the eighteenth century. There it
The middle months of 2016 in the North Atlantic world offered a distinctly depressing constellation. This book offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America's engagement with the world during this period. The spate of killings of African Americans raised acute issues about the very parameters of citizenship that predated the era of Civil Rights and revived views on race associated with the pre- Civil War republic. The book analyses an account of world politics that gives ontological priority to 'race' and assigns the state a secondary or subordinate function. Andrew Carnegie set out to explain the massive burst in productivity in the United States between 1830 and 1880, and in so doing to demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of republicanism. He called for the abolition of hereditary privilege and a written constitution. The book also offers an exegesis of the US foreign policy narrative nested in the political thought of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Understanding the nature of this realist exceptionalism properly means rethinking the relationship between realism and liberalism. The book revisits Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, which reviews the intellectual and policy environment of the immediate post- Cold War years. Finally, it discusses Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, best known for his hawkish service to the George W. Bush administration, and his strong push for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
the State Department, together with the Pentagon, the CIA and other security and intelligence organs of the US government, as well as the Department of Commerce and the Department of the Treasury. To grasp its importance, it is necessary to distinguish it from the eccentric and unpredictable character of Donald Trump. But it is also necessary to recognise that it would take a character like Trump to bring about such a break from the history and tradition of US foreign policy. From a strictly academic perspective, the new strategy document looks
This is the first monograph length study that charts the coercive diplomacy of the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as practiced against their British ally in order to persuade Edward Heath’s government to follow a more amenable course throughout the ‘Year of Europe’ and to convince Harold Wilson’s governments to lessen the severity of proposed defence cuts. Such diplomacy proved effective against Heath but rather less so against Wilson. It is argued that relations between the two sides were often strained, indeed, to the extent that the most ‘special’ elements of the relationship, that of intelligence and nuclear co-operation, were suspended. Yet, the relationship also witnessed considerable co-operation. This book offers new perspectives on US and UK policy towards British membership of the European Economic Community; demonstrates how US détente policies created strain in the ‘special relationship’; reveals the temporary shutdown of US-UK intelligence and nuclear co-operation; provides new insights in US-UK defence co-operation, and revaluates the US-UK relationship throughout the IMF Crisis.
Indeed, if there is one thing that most people would probably identify with realist visions of US foreign policy, it would be an implacable hostility to American exceptionalism. There are obviously good grounds for this. For thinkers such as George Kennan, opposition to exceptionalism was the hallmark of realist politics, and it is nearly impossible to find a realist past or present with a good word to say about what they perceive as the most destructive and misguided of all intellectual traditions in US foreign policy. Yet realism actually has a much more complex and
68 3 Jean-François Drolet Carl Schmitt and the American century This chapter offers an exegesis of the US foreign policy narrative nested in the political thought of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985). Along with his friend Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Schmitt is one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His career as a legal theorist and public intellectual defies the sort of short, snappy introduction that has come to be expected of academic writers in our contemporary publishing culture. So let me instead begin by stating
could not hope to sustain once a new peace was in place. In one sense Wilson had been right, although not in the way he had intended: representative democracy did require a safer and more predictable external world but primarily economically. M1218 - THOMPSON TXT.qxp:GRAHAM Q7.3 72 10/3/08 13:10 Page 72 Might, right, prosperity and consent Notes 1 See F. Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); T. J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford: Oxford
remotely proportional to the supply and demand situation, the banks obviously had moved into the geopolitical domain in line with US foreign policy. Why they and other large business would do this is what Karan Bhatia and Dmitri Trenin call the process of ‘de-globalization’. This means that ‘companies are increasingly forced to think of themselves as tied to their home governments’.109 After the US government defined Russia and the contender bloc it is part of, as the enemy, the banks, too, have aligned themselves on this policy. Surveillance by the ‘Five Eyes’ (NSA
This chapter explores the early consequences of the demise of Bretton Woods and American financial liberalisation, reporting the repercussions of the United States' economic and military power. West German firms quickly exploited the new markets and investment opportunities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The events of 1979 led the Carter administration to another change in dollar policy, with huge consequences. The consequences of the second oil-price shock, and the foreign and economic policies of the Reagan administration, were more beneficial for the British and Italian modern democratic nation-states. The United States' final victory in the Balkans demonstrated much about US dominance of the post-Cold War world. India shares serious economic problems with other post-colonial countries. The international trading order that has developed since the end of Bretton Woods retains the capacity to generate significant political problems for the states of post-colonial developing countries.
This chapter investigates the multifaceted cultural program at the American posts in Belgrade and Zagreb, its aims, content and target public. As locations of the cultural vanguard, USIS attracted prominent Yugoslav intellectual and cultural intelligentsia. With 11,000 copies of the daily Bilten, and 25,000 of Pregled, a local USIS magazine, the American centres promoted book, magazine, exhibit, lecture, English teaching, music, and film-lending programs with the priority of advancing US foreign policy and disseminating American values and ideals. It analyses the major themes around which the library program revolved, such as American democracy, capitalism, and freedom. This chapter relies on four interviews of former USIS employees and visitors: USIS Zagreb library director, Nada Apsen, USIS Zagreb librarian, Zdenka Nikolić, USIS Belgrade librarian, Petar Nikolić, and Sonja Bašić, a Yugoslav USIS user.