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The purpose is to trace and assess the ways in which the US has used multilateral institutions/organizations (both those international institutions/organizations of which it is a member and those regional institutions/organizations of which it is not) and multilateralism itself to pursue its interests on the African continent. The emergence of a noticeable multilateral dimension to American policy towards Africa is situated against two backgrounds: the first (Sect. 1 of the chapter) deals with the general features of American policy towards Africa since the Second World War and the role that multilateralism in general has played in that; the second (Sect. 2) deals with the rise of multilateralism (and multilateral regional institutions/organizations) on the African continent as a process that has a dynamic of its own. This perspective on Africa as an agent, and not simply as an object, of US policy is important for maintaining a critical perspective on the successes but also the contradictions and failures of US policy towards Africa. The final two sections offer a detailed description and evaluation of the dimensions of multilateralism in post‐cold‐war US policy, and, in particular, the Clinton era, which, in many respects, encapsulates much of what is right and wrong with US policy towards the continent. The evaluation made and the general assumptions used to approach the theme of US policy towards Africa are informed by a broadly neo‐Gramscian appraisal of the hegemonic function of the US in the current global political and economic order, and of the place of multilateralism within that hegemonic function.

Describes the book as a response to intensification of the debate about the place of multilateral organizations in US foreign policy, and starts by outlining various American attitudes to the debate. Next there are three sections that discuss the main topics covered by the book: Perspectives on the US and Multilateral Organizations; Explaining US Behaviour Towards Multilateral Organizations — internal factors and external factors; and The Impact of the US on Multilateral Organizations. The final section describes the structure of the study presented in the book and provides chapter outlines.

Considers how domestic political processes affect American behaviour in and towards multilateral organizations. The author first discusses the nature of American exceptionalism and looks at the ways in which what he describes as a deeply ingrained sense of American exceptionalism coupled with pragmatism affects the country's approach to multilateral institutions. An examination is then made of the ups and downs of US policies towards UN over the course of the 1990s, the contrasting politics of the 1994 decision to join the newly created World Trade Organization (WTO), and US financial withholdings in the 1990s and the steps taken towards partial payment of the resulting arrears in 1999–2000. Far more positive attitudes are noted towards the WTO than the UN, the latter being perceived as a riskier venue for the promotion of US interests. It is concluded that, while the US is generally reluctant to defer to multilateral processes, it cannot be accused of being hostile to all forms of multilateral organization: it is pragmatic and peacekeeping case‐specific in its choice of foreign policy tools.

The book has sought, first, to determine whether there is any meaningful variation in US behaviour towards multilateral organizations and which factors carry the most explanatory weight in determining US behaviour and policy towards these organizations, and also to explore the extent to which US behaviour differs across issue area, from security to economics to the environment. Second, it has sought to assess in a more detailed way the nature of the US impact on multilateral organizations and what forms of impact are particularly salient, whether this varies across cases, and why. The general finding is that there is no clear pattern or trend that signals a growing US rejection of multilateral organizations as venues for the promotion of US foreign policy interests, although in the different issue areas there is more evidence of unilateralism in the area of security than economic cooperation. The candidate explanatory factors suggested in the introduction are revisited in the light of the empirical evidence offered by the authors, in order to provide an overall assessment of the forces shaping US practice: the internal factors highlighted include American exceptionalism (the most important), partisanship, interest groups, and bureaucratic interests; the external factors include the enhancing and sustaining of US power, and the perceived effectiveness of the organizations concerned. Last, an assessment is made of the impact of US policy towards multilateral organizations across the range of cases.

Argues that American ambivalence about multilateral institutions (organizations), and variations in its institutional relations with Europe, reflect a basic dilemma that lies at the heart of international institutional agreements: the attraction of institutional agreements for the leading states is that they potentially lock other states into stable and predictable policy orientations, thereby reducing the need to use coercion; but the price that the leading state must pay for this institutionalized cooperation is a reduction in its own policy autonomy and its unfettered ability to exercise power. The central question that American policy‐makers have confronted over the decades after 1945 in regard to US economic and security ties with Europe (and elsewhere around the world) is how much policy lock‐in of such states is worth how much reduction in American policy autonomy and restraints on its power. The result is a potential institutional bargain that lies at the heart of America's multilateral ties to Europe and the wider array of post‐war multilateral institutions championed by the US. In this bargain, the leading state wants to reduce compliance costs and weaker states want to reduce their costs of security protection; the leading state agrees to restrain its own potential for domination and abandonment in exchange for the long‐term institutionalized cooperation of subordinate states. The first section, State Power and Institutions, develops the logic of the institutional bargain that has informed America's post‐war order building experience and continues into the new century. The next section (American Institution Building) explores various aspects of this institutional strategy as it appears in America's relationship with Europe in the 1940s and again after the cold war, and the conclusion assesses the relevance of the institutional bargain in an era of American unipolarity.

This chapter examines the relationship between empire and global political order. The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section unsettles some of the assumptions that are often made about empire, in particular about the inevitability of the end of empire; the redundancy and outmodedness of empire as a form of political order, and the consequent implication that the natural focus of international relations should be the relations amongst states or nation-states. The sheer extent of the power of the United States and the apparent obviousness of the view that we are living in a unipolar world have brought back the language of empire and have led many to see the United States as an imperial power. The second section considers how we should understand that power. It argues that notions of informal empire provide some analytical purchase, but neglect both the consistently important role of military power and coercion in the evolution of US foreign policy, and the importance of rules, norms, and institutions — what one might call the formal side of so-called informal empire. The third section examines five of the most commonly cited reasons for the demise of both empire and top-down hierarchical conceptions of international order more generally. Rather than comparing the extent and character of US power directly with that of other hegemonic states, it asks how these five factors may have changed in ways that would make a hegemonic order viable and potentially sustainable.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of diaspora populations in the United States, who have sought to influence US foreign policies toward their homelands. Diasporas' actual or potential influence on US foreign policies toward their homelands has been greatly controversial, particularly during times of crisis or war. Diasporas, whose many members have assimilated over multiple generations into American society and established a base of social and political power, such as Irish and Jewish immigrants and their descendants, seem to exert significant influence. However, while influential in many respects, the Irish diaspora has rarely been able to undermine the United States' alliance with Britain. In contrast, the Jewish diaspora has prevailed over other diasporas and over the United States' national interests in shaping US policies toward the Middle East. This book thus explores the nature of diasporas and the history of their relations with the US government.

This chapter posits that understanding the determinants of US policy for the region is vital for theorizing South Asian security. It argues that structural realist explanations do not adequately capture post–Cold War security dynamics or US policy in South Asia, and that a more fine-tuned approach sensitive to domestic and bureaucratic politics in the United States and in both India and Pakistan is necessary. Tracing the US foreign policy towards India and Pakistan from the latter part of the Clinton administration to the administration of George W. Bush, if focuses on: factors/variables affecting the formulation of US policy towards India and Pakistan in the post–Cold War period, the impact of domestic variables on foreign policy, and the interactive nature of domestic and external interests that aids the definition of the situation, enabling the decision-maker to act. This study examines patterns of interaction among the various actors that led to a re-appraisal of US policy towards Indian and Pakistan. This chapter argues that, in foreign policy analysis, policy behaviour is the product of individuals acting in the name of the state.

This chapter considers the limited set of US foreign policy initiatives in Turkey's northern and southern neighborhoods since the early 1990s. It begins by tracing US foreign policies in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, outlining the implications these have had for the evolution of Turkish foreign policy. The United States is only one of many proponents of Turkish foreign policy, whose primary determinants are domestic. In other words, Turkey is very much an agent in its own right, yet, the United States influences the broader context in which European debates about Turkey are conducted. The latter part of the chapter illustrates the European reactions to US policies in Turkey's neighborhood, examining the effects on Europe of US material, ideational, and discursive expressions of power in and around the region.

Chapter 1 first provides an overview of the multiple sources of foreign policy that shape state behavior abroad. Key sources include the external environment, the societal environment of the nation, the bureaucratic setting in which policymaking occurs, and the individual characteristics of policymakers. The chapter then describes how these sources help reveal a distinctive US approach to transitional justice that is symbolic, retributive, and strategic, and explores each of these characteristics in turn. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the US approach for the field of transitional justice and for US foreign policy.

In 1977, the Carter administration began working to implement a new guiding strategy for US foreign policy, oriented toward the promotion of human rights and the management of economic interdependence among the advanced industrialized countries. Carter’s world order politics reflected both the oversights of the Nixon years and the influence of the Trilateral Commission. To manage economic globalization, the Carter administration promoted policy cooperation, its efforts culminating in the Bonn summit of the G-7 in 1978. To promote human rights, the Carter administration devised guidelines for tethering military and financial aid to foreign nations to human rights standards, and applied them with particular rigor in Latin America. By late 1978, however, Carter’s world order politics was already encountering difficulties: the administration’s human rights policy lacked consistency; policy coordination failed to stabilize the liberal world economy; and Iran, a longtime US ally, was imploding.

This chapter explores both a brief typology for the import and export of law, and three different stages in the law and development movement. It also examines the export of US clinical legal education in the context of that movement and argues that it is not legal imperialism, at least in the context of law and development theory as it is practiced today. It reviews the first stage of law and development policy (1960s to mid-1970s), which comes the closest to legal imperialism, but argues that even that critique is flawed. In the second, “rule of law and democracy” stage (1980s and 1990s) and the third, or “human rights and freedom” stage (late 1990s forward), clinical legal education has taken on an increasingly important, but always secondary place in the range of development priorities and alternatives.

US foreign policy in the high Cold War was agnostic, if not indifferent, to the idea of human rights. The United States collaborated with authoritarian regimes and, under Nixon, built a cooperative relationship with the USSR, a notorious abuser of human rights. During the mid-1970s, a campaign for human rights was unfolding in the realms of transnational and domestic politics that nonetheless elevated the importance attached to human rights in US foreign policy. Congressmen, such as Donald Fraser, held hearings on the place of human rights in foreign policy, and Cold War hawks, such as Senator Henry M. Jackson, assailed détente as an accommodation of illiberal Communist regimes. The resurgence of an ideological style in US foreign policy, keyed to the language of human rights, made the pursuit of Soviet-American détente untenable in US domestic politics, with far-reaching consequences.

By the late 1960s, the dollar-based international monetary order was in crisis. Its undoing owed to the relative decline of US economic power within the West and to the rise of transnational finance, which had destabilized the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Only partially comprehending these factors, the Nixon administration sought to reinvigorate US economic power by orchestrating a devaluation of the dollar. Doing so proved contentious with US allies and stymied the international cooperation on which the Bretton Woods order depended. Eventually, the international economic crises of the early 1970s would be resolved, not with the restabilization of the international monetary system on terms more favorable to the United States, as Nixon had intended, but with the breakdown of the postwar international economic order and with the ascent of market-led globalization.

This chapter further discusses missile defence, although it shifts from the official strategic documents to ‘everyday’ practices, first describing the realm of the everyday as one which covers an entire network of socially embedded meaning, and then stating that NMD connects with the sphere of daily life in various ways. The next section considers the use of the image of the defence shield to describe the function of NMD and takes a look at the place where missile defence – as identity practice – is reproduced in and intersects with daily life discourses. The chapter also introduces David Tanks' analogy, where the defence system is compared to the stages of a baseball match, and the intimate correlation between popular culture and the textual practices of US foreign policy.

Preoccupied with Cold War geopolitics, the Nixon administration struggled to comprehend-and manage-Third World crises that produced spectacles of human suffering and generated demands for humanitarian action. This chapter juxtaposes two episodes-the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-70 and the South Asian Crisis of 1971-to demonstrate how Cold War considerations shaped Nixon’s Third World policies. In Nigeria, where Cold War considerations were largely absent, Nixon indulged humanitarian calls for relief aid. In South Asia, where Nixon perceived that the Cold War stakes were high, he aligned US policy with Pakistan, even as Pakistan perpetrated serious human rights violations against the Bengali nationalist movement. Contrasted, these episodes illustrate the rise of humanitarian demands upon foreign policy in the early 1970s.

This chapter explores the issue of declassification, charting the battles that have been fought over the incorporation of CIA activity within the State Department's long-established documentary series, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). The CIA's role in the ‘declassification wars’ that have plagued the FRUS series provides fascinating insights into the CIA's motivation for protecting its equity in the contested landscape of US foreign policy.

In this chapter, Price-Smith discusses the relationship between energy flows and the evolution of civilization. He analyses the historical influence of oil on the conduct of US foreign affairs, arguing that the USA’s symbiotic relations with the corporate sphere, in its quest to obtain foreign oil (for itself and for the other OECD countries), has contributed to its frequently illiberal behavior in the conduct of foreign policy. Thus, the USA’s drive to maintain its hegemony over international energy flows (particularly oil) reveals the illiberal core of the modern liberal international order. Moreover, Price-Smith argues that this symbiotic association between the state and oil corporations has generated path dependencies that limit positive adaptation.