THE FUTURE OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

Robert Jervis
Loren Kando
Editors

2008 · $25.50 (APS Members: $20.40)
ISBN13: 978-1-884853-07-4 · ISBN10: 1-884853-07-2

The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy brings together in one volume essays that explore recent developments in American foreign relations. In addition to examining the conditions that inform U.S. strategy, the book discusses international reactions to U.S. military and geopolitical power. A concluding section addresses the role of human rights and civil liberties in the construction and implementation of U.S. policies.

ROBERT JERVIS (Columbia University) writes:

All of these issues will confront the new administration. It will have to decide whether and how to seek democracy abroad, how to set priorities among competing foreign policy goals, how much the counter-terrorism agenda should drive American foreign policy, how to deal with human rights abuses abroad, and what to do about prisoners currently held at Guantanamo Bay or captured in the future. Constructing a coherent and effective policy will be a challenge as great as those the country faced in 1945 and failed to meet in 2001–02

CHRISTOPHER HEMMER (Air War College) examines the impact of September 11 on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. He also explores the potential dangers for American foreign policy that could result from an over-active interventionist policy.

JEFFREY M. CAVANAUGH (Mississippi State University) analyzes the process of ‘‘threat inflation’’ in the United States by examining three positive cases and one negative case of threat inflation since 1945. He concludes that successful threat inflation and hawkish policies stem from the interaction of several factors.

SETH G. JONES (Georgetown University) examines the increase in cooperation of Europe’s defense industry. He challenges the view that European cooperation is more fiction than fact and argues that the changing structure of the international system has caused a notable rise in defense cooperation. European states, he argues, have been motivated by a desire to decrease reliance on the United States and to increase European power.

PIKI ISH-SHALOM (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) traces the process by which leading neoconservatives endorsed the structural theories of democratic peace, generating a grand strategy of forceful democracy promotion. He analyses the reasons for this endorsement and its impact on American foreign policy. He then goes on to explore some internal incoherencies in this neoconservative grand strategy.

CHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEIS (Tulane University) examines the importance of ‘‘credibility’’ in the U.S. war on terrorism. He challenges the conventional wisdom that a healthy reputation for resolve keeps a country safer or helps it pursue its goals. He argues that the credibility of the United States—or lack thereof—will not prove to be decisive in the fight against extremism.

JOHN W. DIETRICH (Bryant University) explores U.S. human rights policy in the post-Cold War era. He notes important policy developments, but also continued constraints. He concludes that the constraints stem from the realities of global and domestic politics.

ERIC A. HEINZE (University of Oklahoma) compares the U.S. response to the crisis in Darfur to that of the Rwandan genocide ten years earlier. He concludes that prevailing domestic and international political realities during the debate over the Darfur crisis allowed U.S. administration officials to use the rhetoric of genocide as a substitute for taking more forceful action to stop the killings.

JEROME SLATER (State University of New York at Buffalo) argues that in certain circumstances in the war on terrorism, the coercion or perhaps even the torture of captured terrorists may be both necessary for national security and morally a lesser evil than the preventable mass murder of innocents.