American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers by Perry Anderson

Author:Perry Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

___________________

1Bush: ‘A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent superpower: the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power—and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained; they trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right’: State of the Union Address, January 1992.

2Susan Watkins, ‘The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty’, New Left Review 54, Nov–Dec 2008—the only serious historical, let alone critical, reconstruction of the background and history of the treaty.

3Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11, New York 2008, pp. 35–7. Robert Kagan was another supporter of Clinton in 1992.

4For the latter, see Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble, London and New York 1999, pp. 76–9, 84–92, 103–15.

5‘A final reason for enlargement was the Clinton Administration’s belief that NATO needed a new lease of life to remain viable. NATO’s viability, in turn, was important because the alliance not only helped maintain America’s position as a European power, it also preserved America’s hegemony in Europe’: Robert Art, America’s Grand Strategy and World Politics, p. 222. Art is the most straightforward and lucidly authoritative theorist of US power-projection today. See ‘Consilium’, pp. 150–5 below.

6Chollet and Goldgeier, America Between the Wars, pp. 124, 134.

7For a critical review of the evidence, see Michael Spagat, ‘Truth and death in Iraq under sanctions’, Significance, September 2010, pp. 116–20.

8See Tariq Ali, ‘Our Herods’, New Left Review 5, Sept–Oct 2000, pp. 5–7.

9See ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, New Left Review 48, Nov–Dec 2007, pp. 15–18.

10See ‘Scurrying towards Bethlehem’, New Left Review 10, July–Aug 2001, pp. 10–15 ff.

11For a levelheaded discussion: Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London and New York 2003, pp. 113–5.

12As at every stage of American imperial expansion, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, there was a scattering of eloquent voices of domestic opposition, without echo in the political system. Strikingly, virtually every one of the most powerful critiques of the new course of empire came from writers of a conservative, not a radical, background. This pattern goes back to the Gulf War itself, of which Robert Tucker co-authored with David Hendrickson a firm rejection: the United States had taken on ‘an imperial role without discharging the classic duties of imperial rule’, one in which ‘fear of American casualties accounts for the extraordinarily destructive character of the conflict’, giving ‘military force a position in our statecraft that is excessive and disproportionate’, with ‘the consent and even enthusiasm of the nation’: The Imperial Temptation: The New World Order and America’s Purpose, New York 1992, pp. 15–16, 162, 185, 195. Within a few weeks of the attentats of 11 September 2001, when such a reaction was unheard-of, the great historian Paul Schroeder published a prophetic warning of the likely consequences of a successful lunge into Afghanistan: ‘The Risks of Victory’, The National Interest, Winter 2001–2002, pp. 22–36. The three outstanding bodies of critical analysis of American foreign policy in the new century, each distinctive in its own way, share similar features.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.