American Foreign Policy, Tools & Concerns

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Overview

For most of the twentieth century, the United States defined its foreign policy in relation to the Soviet Union, as the two countries battled each other for dominance during the Cold War. Although the two countries themselves never came to blows, they engaged in social, political, and economic competition around the globe. Following the collapses of the Soviet Union in 1989, many Americans began turning their attention toward domestic policy.

This trend changed with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Since then, foreign policy has returned to center stage, and politicians and candidates hotly debate foreign policy issues. An old adage states that politics stops at the water’s edge, meaning that the United States should not let political disputes influence foreign policy. In reality, though, partisan politics have a great impact on foreign policy.

Tools of Foreign Policy

The term foreign policy refers to a state’s international goals and its strategies to achieve those goals. Foreign policymakers follow the same five steps with which public policy gets made:

Agenda setting: A problem or issue rises to prominence on the agenda.
Formulation: Possible policies are created and debated.
Adoption: The government adopts one policy.
Implementation: The appropriate government agency enacts the policy.
Evaluation: Officials and agencies judge whether the policy has been successful.

Unlike domestic policy, however, foreign policymaking usually involves fewer people and less publicity. In the United States, the president serves as the chief diplomat and is charged with running American foreign policy. The president employs three tools to conduct foreign policy:

Diplomacy
Foreign aid
Military force

Diplomacy

Diplomacy is the act of dealing with other nations, usually through negotiation and discussion. Diplomacy involves meetings between political leaders, sending diplomatic messages, and making public statements about the relationship between countries. The American president, for example, often hosts leaders and chief diplomats of other nations at the White House in order to discuss a variety of issues. Most diplomacy occurs behind the scenes as officials hold secret negotiations or meet privately to discuss key issues.

Approaches to Diplomacy

States generally pursue diplomacy in one of three ways:

Unilaterally: The states acts alone, without the assistance or consent of any other state.
Bilaterally: The state works in conjunction with another state.
Multilaterally: The state works in conjunction with several other states.

There are pros and cons to each of these three approaches. Acting unilaterally, for example, allows a state to do what it wants without compromise, but it must also bear all the costs itself. Acting with allies, on the other hand, allows a state to maintain good relations and to share the diplomatic burden, but this often requires compromise.

American Isolationist Versus Internationalist Attitudes

Americans have always debated what role the United States should play on the global stage. Those people who advocate a strategy of largely ignoring the rest of the world are called isolationists. In contrast, those people who advocate taking an active role in world affairs are called internationalists. Since World War II, U.S. foreign policy has taken an active leadership role in international politics.

Foreign Aid

States often help each other to improve relations and achieve their own foreign policy objectives. There are two types of foreign aid:

Military aid: States donate, sell, or trade military equipment and technology to affect the military balance of power in certain key regions of the world
Economic aid: States donate or loan money to other counties to boost economic development.

Military Force

In some cases, states use military force or the threat of military force to achieve their foreign policy objectives. The use of military forces often involves stronger states pressuring weaker states to get what they want.

Example: The practice of forcing a weak state to comply with a stronger state via the threat of force is sometimes called Finlandization. In the final days of World War II, Finland reached a peace agreement with the Soviet Union. Even though both countries knew that the Soviets could have easily overwhelmed the Finns, neither wanted war, and the Soviets preferred to use their military elsewhere. The terms of the peace treaty basically gave the Soviets everything they wanted, so much so that Finland almost became a puppet of the Soviet Union.

Deterrence

Deterrence refers to the build up of military force as a threat to warn another state not to pursue a particular course of action.

Example: Throughout the Cold War, the United States relied on the strength of its nuclear and conventional weapons to deter the Soviet Union from invading western Europe.

American Foreign Policy Concerns

As the greatest military and economic power in the world, the United States has taken an active role in international politics. The United States values security and stability, both at home and abroad, above all else, and focuses on a number of areas to achieve those ends:

Terrorism
Nuclear proliferation
Free trade
Humanitarianism
Environmental issues

Terrorism

Terrorism has been used by groups of all ideological and political views, from the leftist Red Brigades in Europe to the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1994. A number of foreign and domestic terrorists have launched attacks against American interests since the early 1980s. In 1982, a suicide bomber killed 241 American military personnel in Lebanon. A group of Islamic fundamentalists attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, and al Qaeda attacked American embassies in Africa in 1998. Al Qaeda’s devastating, coordinated attacks on September 11, 2001, prompted officials in Washington to make combating terrorism the central focus of American foreign policy.

September 11th

Using passenger planes as weapons, nineteen terrorists damaged the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center complex in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 people in the process. The terrorist network al Qaeda carefully planned the attack to protest American foreign policy in the Middle East.

The War on Terror

Following the attack, President George W. Bush rallied the nation to fight back against the terrorists responsible. The United States successfully led a coalition force in an invasion of Afghanistan, where the governing Taliban regime had sheltered and aided the core leadership of al Qaeda, including Saudi exile Osama bin Ladin. Bush also created the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate efforts at home to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Bush’s War on Terror broadened the scope of the American response from fighting al Qaeda and other groups intent on attacking the United States to fighting all terrorists around the world. Since 2002, the United States has funded many wars on terror being fought by other governments in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. The United States has even sent military consultants to other countries. As a result of these wars, a few terrorists groups, including the Irish Republican Army, have voluntarily renounced violence.

Terrorism and Other States

Many states around the world have lived with the threat of terrorism for far longer than the United States. Irish Republican Army terrorists frequently attacked English civilians in London in the 1980s, for example, to protest British control of Northern Ireland. Israel suffers from frequent terrorist attacks too: at one time from the Palestinian Liberation Organization and currently from Hamas, an Islamist terrorist organization based in Lebanon.

The Bush Doctrine

In 2002, President Bush argued that the United States has the right to eliminate its enemies before they attack American interests, a policy now known as the Bush Doctrine. Although previous presidents had always believed that the United States could defend itself by striking its enemies first, Bush was the first president to put that policy into effect when he authorized the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to prevent dictator Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States and its allies. Numerous critics, however, have challenged the Bush Doctrine, claiming that this largely unilateral policy has damaged American integrity abroad. Other critics have contended that the Bush Doctrine has undermined America’s ability to criticize other aggressive states.

Nuclear Proliferation

The United States has worked hard to prevent other countries from acquiring and developing nuclear weapons. The United States worries that rogue states might use nuclear technology irresponsibly to attack their enemies without thinking of the global repercussions. In 1968, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty tried to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. At the time, only five states had nuclear weapons: the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China, all of which had a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Nearly every country in the world signed the treaty, thereby agreeing not to seek or spread nuclear weapons.

Despite the agreement, however, a few states have still acquired or developed nuclear weapons, including India, Pakistan, and, most recently, North Korea. Most foreign policy analysts believe that Israel also has nuclear weapons, even though Israel refuses to reveal whether this is true. Iran is currently seeking to acquire nuclear technology, ostensibly to be used only for electrical power, even though few world leaders believe this claim.

Nuclear Arsenals Around the World

Although only a few states currently have nuclear weapons, many have sought to acquire them over the past few decades. Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Germany, Poland, Serbia, Romania, Sweden, and perhaps Saudi Arabia have all launched nuclear weapon research programs at some point in the last forty years. South Africa also once had nuclear weapons but dismantled them in the early 1990s.

Free Trade

Since the end of World War II, the United States has led the way in creating a number of international institutions that govern international trade. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the largest and most powerful of these institutions. It seeks to promote free trade among member nations by reducing or eliminating domestic subsidies and protective tariffs. WTO members must agree to abide by the organization’s trade regulations, and almost all the world’s countries are represented in the membership.

The governing body of the WTO has the authority to punish any member state that violates these rules. Many American laborers believe that such organizations hurt American industry and lead to outsourcing, transferring jobs formerly available to American workers to workers in other countries. Proponents of free trade—including the American government—however, argue that the benefits of free trade far outweigh the costs because free trade lowers the price of consumer goods and allows Americans to purchase more with their money.

Humanitarianism

The United States has always been one of the major proponents of international human rights and has criticized many developing countries around the world for abusing those rights. President Jimmy Carter even made humanitarianism a major tenant of his foreign policy in the late 1970s. Since the end of World War II, the United States has also been the largest donor of international aid.

At the same time, the United States still lacks a codified humanitarianism foreign policy, responding to some global humanitarian crises (Somalia in 1992) but not others (Rwanda in 1996, Darfur in 2004). In fact, both conservative and liberal presidents and senators have refused to sign most international human rights treaties out of fear that Americans may be stripped of their rights as U.S. citizens when tried in international courts for crimes against humanity. This refusal has prompted much international criticism, especially in the wake of gross human rights violations, most notably at the American-controlled Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and at the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Americans and foreign policymakers alike are divided on whether the United States should make humanitarianism a more formal component of its foreign policy. Proponents argue that the United States should promote human rights as the so-called leader of the free world and as the country with the most resources to help others. Others, however, argue that promoting human rights and sending troops on humanitarian missions achieves nothing tangible for the United States and could lead to wasteful uses of resources and the needless loss of American lives.

Environmental Issues

Environmentalism has taken center stage in foreign policy as well. Many people around the world have realized that some environmental issues require transnational solutions, so they urge their political leaders to reach agreements over a variety of environmental matters. The most ambitious such agreement is the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty signed to curb global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A number of states, however, including China and the United States, refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, claiming that it had been formulated on faulty science. It remains to be seen whether the treaty can be effective without American participation.

American Foreign Policy, Tools & Concerns