Abstract
Gone are the days when the United States believed herself to be impervious to developments elsewhere and was convinced of the automatic relevance of her values as a model for other states. Gone, too, is her desire to remake the world in her own image; damage limitation now prevails over universalism. Entangling alliances are now shunned not merely because of the risks inherent in alliances but also because of doubts about whether the United States has in fact anything to contribute in regions which she finds complicated to understand and onerous to deal with. This self-doubt extends to the use of military force, to the widespread, nagging doubt about whether she can wield it at all, particularly in situations of ambiguity in which goals are unclear, victory hard to define and success elusive.
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Notes
Kenneth Thompson, ‘The Ethics of Major American Foreign Policies’, British Journal of International Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (July 1980), p.122.
Thompson, op. cit., in n.l, pp. 121–2.
Raymond Aron, The Imperial Republic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975), p. 302 (on which 1 rely in this section).
ibid., p. 306
ibid., p. 312.
Though not isolationist, the mood had much in common with detachment. But, unlike the old isolationism, which held that the United States was too good for international affairs, the new feeling was that Americans were not good enough. See Norman Podhoretz, The Present Danger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980).
Stanley Hoffman’s criticism of the Carter Administration, on the first points, in New York Review of Books, 30 January 1980, p. 24, and
of Kissinger, on the complexity of his foreign policy, in Primacy or World Order (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978), p. 79, therefore seems curious.
For example, see Peter Jay, ‘Regionalism as Geopolitics’, Foreign Affairs (America and the World1979), January 1980, p. 488.
Jay, op. cit., p. 511.
Stanley Hoffmann, Primacy or World Order, op. cit. in n. 11, pp. 14–28.
Hedley Bull, ‘Kissinger: The Primacy of Geopolitics’, International Affairs, vol. 56, no. 3, (Summer 1980), p. 486.
See, for example, Tom Farer, ‘The US and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation’, Foreign Affairs, (October 1975).
See Robert Tucker, ‘America in Decline: The Foreign Policy of “Maturity”’, Foreign Affairs (America and the World1979), January 1980, and
The Inequality of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Tom Farer, ‘Searching for Defeat’, Foreign Policy, no. 40 (Fall 1980), pp. 155–74.
See Robert Tucker, ‘America in Decline’, op. cit. in n. 20.
For a thoughtful discussion of ‘cost-free’ policies, see Thomas Hughes, ‘The Crack-Up’, Foreign Policy, no. 40 (Fall 1980), pp. 33–60.
On the difficulties in El Salvador, see William Leo Grande and Carla Anne Robbins, ‘Oligarchs and Officers’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1980).
For various approaches, see Roger D. Hansen, Beyond the North-South Stalemate (New York: McGraw-Hill/Council on Foreign Relations, 1979).
See also his ‘North-South Policy — What’s the Problem?’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1980).
For a discussion of the interrelationship between the political supremacy of the United States and her economic position, see Robert Gilpin, US Power and the Multinational Corporation (London: Macmillan, 1976).
ibid., p. 150.
p. 218.
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© 1982 The International Institute for Strategic Studies
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Chubin, S. (1982). The United States and the Third World: Motives, Objectives, Policies. In: Bertram, C. (eds) Third-World Conflict and International Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06312-3_9
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