The story of American foreign policy in the present era can be characterized as the unfolding of two plots, intertwined yet distinct. One focuses on the presidency of Barack Obama, and consists of efforts to locate his approach within the intellectual historical context of US policy-making and evaluate its wisdom. The other concerns the status of the United States within the international order, and consists of debate over the sustainability of US primacy. These discussions are distinct in terms of both level of analysis and the timeframe with which they concern themselves. The story of the Obama presidency is focused upon the ends and means adopted by a single administration, in power for a maximum of eight years; the larger American story concerns the trajectory of the nation over a generational timescale. They also differ in the core question with which they grapple: the former concerns the question of how America's leadership deploys the nation's power; the latter concerns the quantity of power the nation possesses to be deployed.Nevertheless, these stories are connected, in three ways. First, to the extent that the relative power of the United States declines, its ability to affect its environment through its actions must decrease, with implications for what it can realistically hope to achieve through any strategy. Second, the actions of a nation's leadersif, say, they contribute to bringing about fiscal insolvency, military defeat or political failure-may have consequences over time for its relative power. Even if a single president's choices are unlikely on their own to determine the nation's long-term trajectory, wise or foolish policy can influence the speed and character of an upward or downward journey. Third, a responsible leadership must formulate its policy on the basis of some estimation of the nation's existing relative power resources and their expected future level. If there is a significant mismatch between the capacities assumed by a government's policies and the contextual reality, one can expect the policies in question to end badly.
The Bush National Security Strategy, even as it calls for “a balance of power that favors freedom,” in truth rejects a balance of power approach to international order. It foresees instead the cooperation of all Great Powers under American leadership in furtherance of a common agenda imagined to be founded in universal values. Such rejection of a genuine “balance of power” approach represents a coherent evolution from America’s long tradition of foreign policy thought. Emerging from its founding tradition of separation, U.S. strategic thought was influenced both by Theodore Roosevelt’s advocacy of military strength in the service of good and Woodrow Wilson’s ideological conviction that American engagement in the world could be made conditional on the pursuit of global reform in line with an idealized conception of American values and practices. The conviction that this notional “deal” is still valid provides this administration’s ideological bedrock. The Bush worldview should not be seen as a radically new phenomenon, but as a logical outgrowth from the American foreign policy tradition.
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