George W. Bush left office with his activist foreign policy in disrepute. Fast-forward six years: President Barack Obama has pursued, in some respects, the opposite approach, and yet he has reached an even lower foreign-policy approval rating — around 32 percent — than his harried predecessor, and presides over a new crisis of confidence in American power. It turns out, as Robert Kagan has noted, that while the president delivered exactly the foreign policy the American people wanted when they elected him twice, they don’t like it very much.
One of the reasons the United States swings back and forth between policy approaches — too hawkish or too dovish — is that we tend to root our foreign policy in political philosophy. As one might expect, the four or five dominant American foreign-policy schools of thought have wildly different assumptions about human behavior, human nature, the forces of history, the purposes and uses of power, the role of America, and just about everything else that goes into one’s worldview.
Comments