Abstract
If there is a common denominator in the US foreign policy in the post-Cold War, this consists in the emphasis of the role of world leader. Reference to the need for continual exercise of global leadership by the United States or to the related motif of US greatness as the international leader figures in every single State of the Union Address delivered by a US president for more than two decades from 1990 to 2012. Thus, from George H. W. Bush’s forewarning proclamation in 1991 that “today, in a rapidly changing world, American leadership is indispensable,” to Clinton’s announcement in 1995 that “our security still depends on our continued world leadership for peace and freedom and democracy,” to George W. Bush’s conclusion in 2006 that “the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership—so the United States of America will continue to lead,” to Obama’s 2009’s point that “as we stand at this crossroads of history, the eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us—watching to see what we do with this moment, waiting for us to lead,” every post— Cold War president has paid homage to the US position as number one. The most recent address in 2012 is also a case in point, as it mentions “the renewal of American leadership” and “that America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs.”1
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Notes
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Benjamin Valentino, “Survey on Foreign Policy and American Overseas Commitment,” available at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~benv/files/poll%20responses%20by%20party%20ID.pdf; Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966), p. 74, fn. 8.
Bob Woodward, The Choice: How Clinton Won (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), pp. 253–7.
As prospect theory argues, losses are resented to a stronger degree than gains, and lead to more risk-acceptant behavior. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47 (March 1979): 263–92; for the application of prospect theory to prestige, see
Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 31, 537–9.
William Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War,” World Politics 61 (January 2009): 28–57
For this structuralist argument, see Nuno Monteiro, “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful,” International Security 36 (Winter 2011): 9–40. Monteiro explains dominant-recalcitrant conflict by reference to the strategy of the dominant state, itself determined by structural (security) considerations. If, giving in to the temptation of capitalizing on its greater relative power, the dominant state opts for offensive dominance it will change the system to fit its own interests, provoking conflict with states that resist such efforts. If, conversely, the dominant state is defensively minded it will still resist the efforts of revision of the status quo by recalcitrant states. However, this manuscript has not found evidence of a physical security motivation for US foreign policy in the interval. Moreover, the outcome that Monteiro seeks to explain does not follow from his structuralist logic. Since only major powers are able to produce a change in the status quo in the sense of a revision of the global distribution of power, the challenges of minor states should be seen by the dominant state as negligible and should not elicit a response.
For alternative accounts of US strategic suboptimal behavior, see inter alia Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005);
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007);
Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006);
Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006);
Richard Betts, American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012);
Jeffrey Taliaferro, Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Stanley Hoffmann, “Sheriffand Missionary,” in The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of the American Empire, ed. Andrew Bacevich (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2003), pp. 176–81; Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane, eds., “Varieties of Anti-Americanism: A Framework for Analysis,” in Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, ed. Katzenstein and Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007);
Christopher Prebble, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
However, the costs might not necessarily be catastrophic, and the fear of decline may be exaggerated. Joseph S. Nye, “The Future of American Power,” Foreign Affairs 89 (November/December 2010): 2–12;
Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh, After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (New York: Times Books, 2006), pp. 25–8. The figures improved with the advent in office of Obama, although by 2012 they had declined in the case of Muslim and Chinese publics, and remained low among Russian and Indian publics. Global Attitudes Project, “Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted, June 13, 2012,” accessible at http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2012/06/Pew-Global-Attitudes-U.S.-Image-Report-FINAL-June-13–2012.pdf.
Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, transl. W. D. Ross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1777.
Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 1;
Shiping Tang, “Reputation, Cult of Reputation, and International Scholarship,” Security Studies 14 (January/March 2005): 46;
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Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), p. 228.
Stephen Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,” International Security 37 (Winter 2012): 7–51;
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Ferguson, Colossus; Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World Government in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
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Onea, T.A. (2013). Conclusion. In: US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137359353_8
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