Lobbies representing foreign interests have an increasingly powerful -- and often harmful -- impact on how the United States formulates its foreign policy, and ultimately hurt U.S. credibility around the world.
Hunger remains one of world's gravest humanitarian problems, but the United States has failed to prioritize food aid and agricultural development. Washington must put agriculture at the center of development aid -- and make it a key part of a new U.S. foreign policy.
Several tendencies in US foreign policy politics generated a new foreign policy consensus set to outlast the Bush administration. Three developments are analysed: increasing influence of conservative organizations - such as the Heritage Foundation, and of neoconservatism; and, particularly, democratic peace theory-inspired liberal interventionism. 9-11 fused those three developments, though each tendency retained its 'sphere of action': Right and Left appear to have forged an historically effective ideology of global intervention, an enduring new configuration of power. This paper analyses a key liberal interventionists' initiative - the Princeton Project on National Security - that sits at the heart of thinking among centrists, liberal and conservative alike. This paper also assesses the efficacy of the new consensus by exploring the foreign policy positions and advisers of President-elect Barack Obama and his defeated Republican rival, Senator John McCain, concluding that the new president is unlikely significantly to change US foreign policy.
J. Anthony Holmes ("Where Are the Civilians?" January/February 2009) makes a number of persuasive points concerning the military's domination of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, fixing U.S. foreign policy requires a comprehensive, long-term approach. An excellent beginning would be to implement fully the proposals contained in a recent joint report by the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Henry L. Stimson Center. They are ambitious enough to make rapid implementation hard work, but they are probably only the minimum necessary to meet today's requirements.
We are troubled by the assertions made by John Newhouse ("Diplomacy, Inc.," May/June 2009) about NATO enlargement -- an initiative in which we both played direct roles -- as well as by his broader thesis about the role of ethnic population groups in shaping U.S. foreign policy.
THE REPUBLICAN Party is not in trouble. It is in peril. In 2006 it lost control of Congress. In 2008 it lost the presidency. And in 2010 it may lose again unless the party changes course, particularly in foreign policy, where it has, by and large, enjoyed a commanding lead over Democrats for decades.
By nominating his confidante, Susan E. Rice, as ambassador to the United Nations and restoring the post's cabinet status, President Barack Obama enunciated his ''belief that the UN is an indispensable_and imperfect_forum.'' He not only announced that the United States has rejoined the world and is ready to reengage with all member states, but also that multilateralism in general and the UN in particular would be essential to U.S. foreign policy during his administration by stating the simple fact that ''the global challenges we face demand global institutions that work.''
President Hugo Cha´vez of Venezuela has achieved what no other Latin American leader has since the end of the Cold War: bringing security concerns in the Western Hemisphere back to U.S. foreign policy. Might Venezuela provoke a war against neighboring Colombia, spread weapons among insurgents abroad, disrupt oil sales to the United States, provide financial support to Hezbollah, al Qaeda or other fundamentalist movements, offer safe havens for drug dealers, invite Russia to open a military base on its territory, or even acquire nuclear weapons? These security concerns did not exist less than a decade ago, but today they occupy the attention of U.S. officials. Attention to these conventional security issues, however, carries the risk of ignoring what thus far has been Venezuela's most effective foreign policy tool in challenging the United States: the use of generous handouts abroad, peppered with a pro-poor, distribution-prone discourse. While the U.S. debate revolves around ''hard power'' and ''soft power,'' this other form can be called ''social power diplomacy.''